Hosted by Duncan Greive and Jane Yee, Coming Home is a five-part series about the influx of highly-skilled New Zealanders returning in 2020 and what it means for us as a country. In this episode: why do people leave in the first place?

Back in June, Duncan wrote a story about a phenomenon he’d noticed over the previous couple of months – a remarkable number of high profile overseas-based New Zealanders were coming back to live, work and start new businesses. The reason why seemed fairly obvious – a global pandemic – but lots of other questions remained.

In the first episode, Duncan and Jane meet recent returnees Julia Arnott-Neenee, Mahoney Turnbull, Rachel Morris and Polly Fryer to ask how and why they left in the first place. These are the individual stories at the heart of what we call New Zealand’s ‘brain drain’ – but what does that term even mean? Paul Spoonley, demographer and author of The New New Zealand, can explain.

Coming Home is brought to you by The Spinoff and Kiwibank.

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