An extract from Rachel Buchanan's article in The Drum on Australian media outsourcing to New Zealand in the latest Griffith Review Edition 43: Pacific Highways.
MELBOURNE (The Drum/Pacific Media Watch): Money was tight when I reluctantly took a job as a subeditor with Fairfax Editorial Services. I sat in an office in Wellington and edited newspapers in regional and rural New South Wales. My job existed because Fairfax had sacked 66 production journalists in Newcastle and Wollongong and replaced them with 40 others in Wellington.
I was on NZ$65,000, about half of what someone with my experience would have earned in a metropolitan Australian newsroom less than five years ago.
(This trans-Tasman pay disparity exists in any field you can think of, including the airline industry. In 2010 a first officer employed by Qantas subsidiary Jetconnect was paid NZ$77,978 while a Qantas first officer earned the equivalent of NZ$126,815. In 2011, Fair Work Australia rejected the Australian Pilots Association test case on the issue.)
By taking the offshored Fairfax job, I had become enmeshed not only in the imminent death of newspapers but also the rise of New Zealand as a low-wage economy (save at least 30 percent in costs over here folks), a little rival to the Philippines and India (save 70 percent or more over there).
The staff on Project Hermes – Fairfax’s codename for the NZ offshoring plan – worked in a windowless basement on Boulcott Street. One night, while I was having fish and chips with my relatives, I joked about my work conditions (zombie journalists, typing robots and crypts). Rather than laugh sympathetically at my tales of drudgery and bewilderment, my uncle Bill expressed his pleasure at New Zealand’s ability to compete.
I respect Uncle Bill. He’s a really lovely guy, but he is also the Deputy Prime Minister. I’m not betraying any confidences here.
What Bill (English) said to me is the same as what he has said in public. In his role as Finance Minister, Bill has welcomed Australian investment in New Zealand and the jobs that come with it.
The logic goes that while lower wages are not good, they do allow New Zealand to compete, and competition is one way to close the gap in wages between the two countries. As yet, there is no evidence that this is happening.
I finished at Fairfax in late December 2012 and we returned to Melbourne the next month. Since then, the offshoring of Australian work to New Zealand has received plenty of media attention. In Australia, much of it has been negative. One theme is that New Zealand is somehow betraying its Anzac mates by stealing Aussie jobs, but the situation is messier than that.
Read Rachel Buchanan's full Drum article
Rachel Buchanan's ABC interview
Lies, media integrity and the new digital environment
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 New Zealand Licence.
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