I'm actually an ex-pat Brit.
My parents bought my younger sister and I to NZ from England in early 1973 when I was 11 y/o. We were "?10 Poms" (something that I was reminded of often at school), some of the last as it turned out. There was a NZ government scheme, 'Asssisted Passage', to bring experienced workers into NZ for its then-burgeoning lamb and wool industry - Australia had a similar scheme. The NZ government paid all but ?10 per person for us to come to NZ via Chandris Lines, a Greek budget shipping company. Nearly six weeks after leaving England we arrived in New Zealand.
(It seems that Wiki thinks it was an Australian-only thing;
We originally went to the South island; The scheme required that you have a job ready and waiting for you and that you stay employed in the NZ framing industry for a minimum of 2 years. Unfortunately Dad was the victim of a canny farmer who took advantage of new naive potentail immigrants, getting them to sign contaracts before leaving the UK and paying minimum wage and putting them up in a run-down shack when they arrived.
Anyway, after the two years Dad moved us to the North Island, the northern Waikato area, where he stayed until retirement. My sister got married and had kids (in that order - just!) and she and her husband moved their family to Australia where there was more money to be had. After almost a couple of decades of spending all of their money flying across the Tasman to see their grandkids twice a year my parents also moved to Aus when Dad retired, mostly to be closer to the grandkids.
I now live just south if Auckland, a town called Pukekohe.
Cheers,