Considering moving to New Zealand?

Maybe New Zealand would be a good place to go live. For some reason this has been coming up lately, like I keep hearing really good things about New Zealand, so this is just another in a series of positive reasons to check out NZ. Perhaps there's something to this?

NZ in grip of 'man drought'
27 July 2005
By SUE ALLEN

If you're a 32-year-old woman finding it hard to meet a mate, it seems there is a good reason. It's not your dress sense, the sparkle of your after-dinner talk or size of your rump but the New Zealand "man drought", according to this year's KPMG population report. Since 1991, the shortfall of New Zealand men in their 30s compared to women has ballooned from 7600 to 23,000 last year.

That means a 32-year old Kiwi woman now has as much chance of finding a male partner of the same age as an 82-year-old woman, said KPMG partner Bernard Salt. And hopping across the Tasman may not help, apparently the man drought has spread there too. In 1976, Australian men outnumbered women by 54,000 providing a "smorgasbord" of choice for female baby-boomers. But by 2004, the tide had turned and women outnumbered men by 20,000. With "mother nature" keeping birth rates equal, Mr Salt believed the main man drain was the Kiwi OE which sucked young men overseas where they fell in love and stayed. "New Zealand girls might go backpacking and have a fling, but they haven't done anything as silly as getting married, and they come back."

The fun would start, he said, when society got used to the imbalance and women starting taking time-shares on men. Tourism New Zealand could cash in by advertising New Zealand as the home of the single woman. The report also found that by 2007, Christchurch may outgrow Wellington as New Zealand's second biggest city. The fastest growing city was Queenstown, where the population rose 7.2 per cent in 2004, and Manukau was the fastest growing area. Meanwhile, Ruapehu lost 3.5 per cent of its population last year, making it the biggest loser by area.

And Mr Salt has one message for the women of Sex in the City who constantly complained that they couldn't find single men in New York. Apparently, there were 106,000 never-married men in Manhattan Island in 2004 compared to 104,000 women - "Stop whingeing".