Ceri

http://edition.cnn.com/2004/WORLD/eu...pider.fear.ap/ Britons fear spiders more than terrorism

Australia
Most top ten common phobias in order - Spiders ( number one) , people, and social situations, flying, open spaces, confined spaces, heights, cancer, thunderstorms, death and heart disease
http://www.australiandoctor.com.au/p...03_phobias.pdf

People are people. It's a bit silly to say Australians don't fear spiders and such as much as Brit's. Spiders, snakes , heights, and flying are probably the most common phobias world wide. I knowlots of Aussie born people who are scared witless of spiders and snakes, and I also know plenty of Brits who are scared of them, and not scared of them too.

I'm a Brit ,and I don't have a fear of spiders or snakes, I love them, they are beautiful creatures.. but I do hate flying, which is among the top phobia list.

Spiders are among the top phobias whether you are a Brit, Aussie, or from planet cuckoo land. Australians are no different with their types of fears.

jayr

Because Poms aren't brought up with spiders that may bite and 'kill' them - they therefore fear these things. How are you with wasps?

wombat42

The only people that immigrate to NZ are Lord Of the Rings freaks and those that have an unnatural interest in sheep.

Pollyana

I thought Mutant/WBB was heading for Oz?

hopper

Hubbard how easy was it to move from NZ to OZ? Any advice about the logistics of moving between the 2 countries? We don't have PR here so we'd would have to apply for for work visas.Did not being in the UK make things more difficult for you or present any particular problems?

We'd have house contents and a car to shift over,can people recommend reputable shipping companies/removals firms? We used PSS before but I'm not sure if they operate on this side of the globe.

Fortunately we opened a Commonwealth Bank of Australia account in London before we left and we transfer cash from it into an ASB account here.Most of our money from selling the house is still in London because the exchange rate is so poor.I'm so glad we didn't buy here when we arrived,if we tried to sell a house now we lose money on it.

We've already had a positive response from one recruitment company I emailed this morning so things are begining to look up

ladylisa

Just reading thru this site reminded me of the time I spent 6 weeks in NZ when travelling 5 years ago. I flew straight from Cairns to Aukland. God I bloody froze! the first thing I did was buy lots of warm clothes. I just remember getting a headache from the wind. I stayed at friends a friends house along the way in Wellington and I remember on a particularly cold day her calling me in the afternoon to give me permission to stoke up the fire for her return from work. God that day was like luxury! Thing is I didnt really think about it being a reflection of the housing until I read this site.

Don

There is a lot of truth to this. As someone who recently travelled round NZ checking out houses, I can vouch for the general crap state of NZ housing but as usual there are big exceptions.

If you go for traditional, older properties - villas, old estate houses, in deep south often brick built properties - you get something much more solid and either reminiscent of Twenties/ Thirties UK, or colonial style a la Singapore, HK, older bits of Sydney. Usually these houses are better built, often have loads of beautiful old wood and would probably be quite heat efficient in winter, fireplace with modern burner being main source of heat.

In contrast, many houses built since the 60s but especially more recently (God I hate fibro!) are just plain rubbish. PP's point about an oversized shed is right. If you just put boards around a frame you end up with a pile of junk.

Heating probably needs to be thought about a bit more. I'd have thought that NZ could easily be a good case for going the Scandinavian way where 70% of new houses now have heat exchangers installed which are very efficient and pay for themselves quite quickly (get heat from the ground).

podgypossum

one company to avoid is Euro Pacific. The shifters were miserable and unhelpful and we also paid for a house clean after we had left. They charged $150, but did not know that my hairdresser was renting the house off the people we sold it to, and when she turned up the same day they were supposed to have cleaned it, they hadnt touched a thing, not even washed the floor!! They obviouslt thought that as we had left the country we would not know they hadnt done anything.

Quinkana

Err, Poms have become so cosseted in double glazed perma-sub-tropical bubbles insulated from the natural world that they have lost the mammalian ability to control their body temperature. Might like to practice before the oil and gas runs out.

Not a problem for Kiwis - made of sterner stuff & haven't lost the knowledge of how to knit a wooly jumper - or when to wear one.

Don

Very versatile animal, the sheep, as the Welsh will verify

Pollyana

Oi! Watch it!! Me & Ceri will be over to sort you out if you're rude about the Welsh

podgypossum

Darn it!!..i obviously married a ferral kiwi..he wouldnt know what a knitting needle looked like.

hopper

that's why I want to need to go to Australia I've obviously evolved too far.

I've been wearing my wooly jumper and socks but they loose their appeal when you wash them and can't get them dry enough to wear.When I take the clean sheets out of the cupboard to put them on a bed they are so damp I put the electric blanket on to dry them out.There are days when it is so cold that I open the windows to let some warmth IN (Today was a bit better though and the sun warmed up the house so much I opened the ranch sliders to let the heat OUT)

Now I can see why NZlanders are the worlds biggest consumers of wool

hopper

Me too. I come from good Welsh stock: parents both from the Valleys and I went to secondary school in Pembroke Dock (ok, so that's not really Wales)

hubbard

Hopper - in terms of how easy is it to move to Oz from Nz, the PR route is exactly the same as if you were applying in the UK. What does go in your favour in the Oz work market is your Kiwi work experience , granted not as good to ozzie employers as Oz experience, but it shows you are used to kiwi / australian work practices and culture, somewhat closer than just UK experience. My advice is to apply for jobs in Oz (hoping they will sponsor you for a work visa) whilst applying for PR. That is what we have done, applied for PR and playing the waiting game along with countless others and firing off our CVs regularly in the hope of getting a work visa first. Logistically wise it is way smaller and cheaper move from the NZ to OZ as opposed to UK to NZ, so if you have already done that you will be plain sailing.

A message to Shephard and his/her ilk, not all pommies come to NZ with the option of getting NZ citizenship and then catching the first cab to OZ. We were openminded to staying in NZ if it had proved a better opportunity for us. It hasn't, so we will depart NZ and enter Oz legitimately, no NZ passport and having got PR the same way as countless others.