Kiwianarama

No, sorry, we don't tip. We're Kiwis.

With an economy built on low-margin exports such as dairy, freedom camping and the haka, New Zealand workers earn among the lowest wages in the first world. Sadly, they don’t even compare that well with workers in the second or third world either. A middle-class Nigerian, on a basic internet scammer’s salary, probably has a better chance of paying back his student loan before the age of retirement, than does the average Kiwi graduate.

But on the positive side – and an asset which is more prominently featured in tourist and immigration brochures than the low average wage or high rates of aggravated assault – New Zealand does have a lot of quite nice cafes, bars and restaurants.

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A lovely cake tin made from Number 8 Wire

Number 8 Wire is, literally, a gauge of steel wire, popularly used in rural fencing. That’s fences around paddocks, not two gay farmers fighting each other with floppy swords.

But in New Zealand, the phrase, like other local oddities (women’s rubgy, Invercargill, our tender, ‘hands on’ approach to animal husbandry), has a deeper, more spiritual connection with the land.

Allow me to explain.

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Please hold, I have someone on the other line.

You thought the world had stopped using land-line telephones years ago, right? You were wrong.

Like retired English couples, and migratory Godwits – it turns out they all just came to New Zealand to die.

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Doctor models new hat for short people. Still has to stand up to be noticed.

Few moments in New Zealand life are more uncomfortable, than the arrival of the bill at the end of a group meal.

Kiwis are inherently programmed to try to make everything in life as ‘fair’ as possible.  So the thought of simply dividing the tab, evenly, by the number of people present, fills the average Kiwi with the sort of confusion and terror normally reserved for an All Blacks v France Rugby World Cup match.

Which makes squaring up the tab in New Zealand, one of the most difficult, most convoluted group agreements to reach, since the David Bain jury. Both of them.

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A graph demonstrating actual house science

New Zealanders fall into one (occasionally two) of following three states of being; “Thinking about buying a house”, “Buying (then paying off) a house”, or “Trying the sell a house”.  Anybody who doesn’t identify with at least one of these categories is probably either an asylum seeker, or a tourist.

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Just a pack of raisins, thanks.

New Zealand takes pride in being ‘the world’s guniea pig’. A micro-society, allegedly employed by the large (inverted commas) Corporations and/or Governments of the world to beta test new technologies, or political ideas, before they are released to much larger countries.

A common argument suggests that this is how New Zealand – an otherwise frontier outpost of technological retardation – developed the first near-cashless society, through the early introduction of Eftpos (Electronic Funds Transfer point… oh, you know what is without having to explain the acronym).

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