Working in New Zealand

Working in New Zealand

14th Jul '08

Freddy Jackson Brown describes his experiences of living and working in New Zealand as a clinical psychologist in a child and family mental health service.

The Beginning
After a couple of false starts, I finally organised a career break with my NHS employer to live and work in New Zealand for 6 months. I would advise anyone interested in doing the same to have a look at Lesley Atchison’s (2003) article in which she described how to go about arranging employment and work visas. The only addition I would make to her excellent article is that it is possible to approach District Health Boards (DHBs) directly to find out about job vacancies. This will save your potential employer the cost of going through a recruitment agency and in my experience increases the likelihood that they will offer a short-term contract. A quick internet search will give you access to the 21 DHBs vacancy bulletins. 

South Island Skies
The first decision we had to make was where we wanted to live. New Zealand is a country blessed with a huge diversity of landscapes and climates and we were spoilt for choice. In the end we chose Invercargill at the bottom of the South Island in part because we wanted something different from our city life in the UK and also because of its fantastic location. Invercargill gives easy access to Fjordland, the Catlins, central Otago, Queenstown, Dunedin and, of course, Rakiura/Stewart Island. In this part of the country the indigenous wildlife is rich and wonderful (and sadly seriously threatened), while the skies, both by day and by night, are truly marvellous. There can be few more beautiful places in the world and if you like the outdoor life, then look no further.

Like the British, Kiwis are fond of talking about the weather, but don’t believe what they say about it being ‘cold’ in the south as that depends on what you’re used to. Our impression was that the climate was similar to the southern UK. And as we were frequently told, ‘There is no such thing as bad weather, just the wrong sports equipment’. So if you’re feeling cold, don’t complain, go skiing instead (it’s only a 2 hour drive away).

The Job
New Zealand’s child and family mental health services are similarly structured to those in the UK, with by and large the same professionals doing the same jobs as in the UK. Nonetheless, the prospect of working in another country filled me with both excitement and anxiety. I was reminded of George Bernard Shaw’s comment that Britain and America were two nations ‘separated by a common language’ and wondered how different ‘New Zealand English’ was. Just how transferable were my skills? Would children and families have similar or would there be issues I was not prepared for? In addition I had no experience of the Maori or pacific island cultures.

Much to my relief I soon discovered that my anxieties were unfounded and the clinical issues were pretty much identical to those I worked with in the UK. The key, as ever, was to see the individual before me and patiently to hear their story. This meant I could hit the ground running and soon built up a caseload similar to my UK client numbers. Due to my limited time I was allocated the seemingly more straightforward cases deemed likely to respond to shorter-term intervention.

Invercargill had a brand new hospital and state-of-the-art IT system (developed by Isoft, the same company responsible for delivering the NHS software upgrade). The system was hugely impressive for organising appointments, meetings and keeping clinical activity records and when I left it was gearing up to hold clinical notes too. If this is what we can look forward to in the NHS, then I think we should be positive. It’s true that nearly everybody moaned about it, but I felt they complained because it was something new to learn, not because it wasn’t any good.

Like many indigenous peoples across the globe, the Maori population is over-represented in the mental health system. To support non-Maori staff working with Maori clients there is a dedicated Maori mental health team with whom I regularly undertook joint assessments. It was explained to me that from the Maori perspective, clients have family and spiritual needs that are often overlooked by western approaches to mental health. I listened to colleagues from Maori mental health ask people about their extended family relationships, their place within their tribal group and their sense of connection to the land and the seasons. Not everyone liked this approach and some (usually the teenagers) refused outright to have any contact with the Maori mental health team.

A word on remuneration - you don’t go to New Zealand to get rich. My salary (which at $67,000 was above the national average) was about 50% of my UK pay, though this was partly because I took a more junior position. The cost of living is considerably less too, so my lower salary didn’t particularly effect our lifestyles. It is possible to earn a lot more money in the private sector (usually via contracts with the state owned enterprise, the Accident Compensation Corporation, ACC) though this takes quite a bit of paperwork and is not really viable for a short stay.

New Zealand’s low salaries are perceived to be having a negative impact on the economy with OECD figures showing that an incredible 24.3% of tertiary educated Kiwis are now working abroad (the highest in the developed world). As a consequence New Zealand has a high need for skilled labour across the board, so it isn’t too difficult for the partners of psychologists to find work too.

Cultural Diversity and Harmony
New Zealand places a strong emphasis on its cultural relations and insists that newcomers have at least some understanding of the nations history and cultural background. At my interview I was asked about my understanding of the Treaty of Waitangi, which is the founding document of New Zealand and the ongoing basis of the relationship between the indigenous Maori population and incoming people.

My induction also included a strong Maori influence. For instance, I was told that I could bring my partner or a family member with me. Now a relative hasn’t accompanied me on a ‘first day’ since my early school days so I declined the offer, but what I didn’t realise was the importance of family and heritage to the Maori culture. All the new inductees line managers were present, along with other senior managers and the CEO. The induction was an effort to welcome new employees, as well as telling us the stuff we needed to know. It felt like they really wanted me there.

A couple of weeks later I had a Mihi (a Maori welcoming ceremony) with the Child and Family Service (CAFS) team where I was working. This time I did bring a relative and my wife was asked to sit behind me during the Mihi. A Maori elder explained that this was not intended to be disrespectful, but instead flowed from their traditions of men standing in front of women to protect them when Maori groups met. Others suggested this wasn’t the case and it had more to do with traditional Maori patriarchy. Whatever the origins of this practice we welcomed the effort to explain what was going on. We were then warmly welcomed (bilingually) before I was asked to say a few words about myself. Not about my qualifications or work experience, rather about my family and where I had come from. We sang some songs in Maori (they wrote the words down for us) and ate some food. All very different from a UK workplace induction.

None of this took a lot of time, but it did take some organising. Interestingly the main impetus for our team’s cultural awareness came from the manager who was a South African. In fact many New Zealanders (including Maori people too) were less interested in Maori traditions and were at times quite critical of its practices, though never openly. The value of harmony and politeness seemed to take precedence over voicing tensions caused by cultural diversity. The impression I had was it was better to let the small things slide than to stir a confrontation.

A striking example of this was when the Minister of Youth Affairs, the Honourable Nanaia Mahuta MP, visited our team. Now I have never met a city councillor, local MP or even a Trust chief executive as part of my job in the UK and here I was sitting next to a New Zealand government minister in our staff room drinking tea. And she genuinely wanted to hear what we had to say - fantastic. What was also interesting to me, however, was that she was accompanied by several people, including a man whose main task was to give her speaking rights in Maori communities. As a woman she could not speak in these settings unless a man introduced her. I was amazed and when I asked my colleagues for their thoughts about this, they uniformly decried it while simultaneously accepting that’s just how it was.

New Zealand’s size to population ration no doubt plays an important part in how it functions. 4 million people overall and only one million on the South Island with a landmass 60% that of the UK. Once out of Auckland we never sat in a traffic jam. There is just more space and the atmosphere is tangibly more relaxed. Smaller populations also make it easier to do certain things (e.g., set up a hospital IT system) and inevitably it means that you are closer to the powers that shape society. For instance, in my short time in Invercargill I met a government minister, attended a seminar given by Andrew Becroft, New Zealand’s principal Youth Court Judge and rubbed shoulders with the city mayor. It felt as though the ‘top brass’ were never far away and that everyone had the chance to be part of what was going on.

Farewell New Zealand
New Zealand, and Southland in particular, is a special place. Before I left I had a greenstone necklace made and then blessed by a Maori elder. Greenstone is sacred to the Maori and he named it Te Taura Here (‘bound twine’). He evoked the image of New Zealand as a rope extending through time made up of millions of tiny fibres bound together. Everyone and everything that comes to New Zealand is like a tiny fibre and becomes part of the rope such that their presence remains long after they are gone. It warms me to thing that part of me will always be in New Zealand, just as I will always carry part of it with me. As B.F. Skinner once said, we change our environment and are changed as we do so.

References
Atchison, L. (2003) A six month locum clinical psychology post in New Zealand. Clinical Psychology, 22.

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