[As published in July/August 2026 BayBuzz magazine.]

Reflections from migrating to Queensland, six months in.

We’d been talking about moving to Australia for years. 

One of those things you say after a bad day, then wake up the next morning and get on with your life. But this year we actually did it. House sold, dog on a plane. Noosa Heads, Queensland. Here we are. 

We were in New Zealand recently for a visit, Hawke’s Bay included. Sitting in a Heretaunga Street cafe with the door open and a freezing wind blowing in, it hit me – it is cold. I had acclimatised to Queensland faster than I realised. 

So beyond the beaches, the surf clubs and the high rises, what is life in Queensland actually like? 

I still haven’t seen a snake. Before we left Hawke’s Bay, most conversations went like this: “Aren’t you worried about the spiders? The snakes? The sharks?” Six months in, nothing. Not a single snake, not a funnel web. I don’t even check inside my shoes before I put them on any more. 

Our gardener mentioned offhandedly that Noosa is full of brown snakes, so maybe we’ve been lucky. Either way, the wildlife apocalypse we’d been warned about hasn’t materialised. Apart from a huntsman the size of my hand that spent a week inside, the most annoying creatures we’ve dealt with so far are the fruit bats who decided our rental car was a public latrine when I made the mistake of parking it under a tree on our first night here. 

The admin was (largely) painless. We had been warned about the perils of navigating Australia’s bureaucracy. But I opened a bank account within half an hour with just a New Zealand passport and a prepay Australian mobile number. Driver’s licences sorted within minutes with no tests required. Medicare sorted within days of arriving. Setting up our Australian company took a couple of hours online. I also got my boat licence within the first month – Maritime Safety Queensland rules the waves and you don’t mess with them, breath testing included. 

New Zealand has a special-category visa arrangement that removes most of the immigration complexity, and Australia has clearly done a lot of work making itself accessible to skilled migrants from comparable countries. If you’re sitting in Hawke’s Bay dreading the paperwork, don’t let it put you off. It was all pretty easy. It felt like we’d trained for a marathon and then found out the course was 5km. 

The Gold Coast surprised us. We’d always written ‘The GC’ off as a bit shallow and flashy. We were wrong. We spent a few days in an 88-storey monolith between Surfer’s Paradise and Main Beach and found it genuinely enjoyable – it’s relaxed, well set up, with excellent public transport on the G-Link tram. And Queensland has a 50-cent cap on all public transport so it’s cheap to get around. 

Australian food is really good. Coming from Hawke’s Bay, we weren’t expecting much. But the food here holds up. The produce is good, there are fantastic restaurants (especially in Noosa), and the seafood is superb. Even the butter is excellent. 

Australians don’t know – or care – much about NZ. The average Australian’s mental model of New Zealand is roughly: beautiful mountains, great place for a holiday, and cold. Queensland has an enormous Kiwi population, so you’d think there would be a bit more familiarity, but there’s not. 

Someone asked if it had started snowing yet – in summer! There is no rivalry and not even much banter. It’s just indifference. Nobody here has heard of Winston Peters, most couldn’t place Wellington on a map or even tell you what the main islands are called. Queenslanders reserve their opprobrium for the ‘Mexicans’. They are the strange people from ‘south of the border’, i.e. Sydney and Melbourne. 

Australians are less exercised about politics than Kiwis. This one took me a while to understand. The political mood here has shifted since we arrived – Pauline Hanson is on a tear, and there is a crackling populist energy in the air. But most Australians I’ve met don’t spend much time on it. I think I understand why now. 

The important decisions about daily life – schools, hospitals, roads – are made at the state level. Even the Covid lockdowns were run by the states. The federal government controls big stuff like tax, immigration, foreign policy, and superannuation. These are large, abstract things that are hard to get your head around, so a lot of people don’t try. They go for tribal vibes instead, which sounds like a recipe for instability, but so far it has worked: Australia went through about ten prime ministers in a short space of time and barely slowed down. The states just kept running. It’s a resilient system, even when the top looks chaotic. 

The business community here is welcoming. We’d expected to spend the first year building the Mogul brand in Australia from scratch – heads down, quietly earning our place. That’s not quite how it played out. Within a couple of months, we were attending networking events in Buderim, chamber of commerce gatherings in Noosa and Maroochydore, and getting a real feel for the Sunshine Coast business scene. We have met the mayors of Noosa and the Sunshine Coast, as well as the deputy state premier. It’s a community that moves quickly and welcomes people who turn up ready to contribute. 

The highlight has been FWD>>>FEST, the Sunshine Coast’s annual festival for entrepreneurs and innovators. We’d actually flown over from Hawke’s Bay to attend the previous year’s event, and left buzzing. Within eight months, we’d sold the house. When FWD>>>FEST 26 came around in May, we went all in, signing on as Ecosystem and Delivery Partners, sponsoring the Day 1 lunch, with me MC-ing a session and George volunteering as a delegate coordinator for the full day. A friend and long-time client flew over from Hawke’s Bay to attend. He walked away with a head full of new ideas and connections. 

So, would we do it again? Yes. Without hesitation. 

Noosa is genuinely beautiful. The people are friendly. The weather is extraordinary, even when that means torrential thundershowers and 32-degree May afternoons. We miss Hawke’s Bay. The wine, the people, the landscape. But we came for a change, and we got one. Just not the kind involving snakes. 

Matt Miller is a digital marketing consultant and Managing Director of Mogul Digital, based in Noosa Heads, Queensland