I currently live in Australia but I am Monégasque and wanted to add a comment on the distance from everything and everyone. Going anywhere will cost a fortune. We are on an expat package and have a trip home paid every year. We have always gone twice a year before COVID, so right now , we are paying more than double what we used to pay for our second trip.
It is not only the cost, it is the time it takes. You need more days in your trip. You take the London flight on Monday night and you land on Wednesday morning. Several days of your holidays are wasted on reaching Europe. In January when you go back, family is at work or school, it is dark and cold.
You will be more or less stuck in a corner of the world. When you are in Europe , you can go for a long weekend in Berlin or Lisboa, here where do you go? It takes hours to go anywhere.
All the people commenting on the quality of life have probably never considered that on the shore of the Mediterranean Sea you can have a great quality of life , I might even add a greater quality of life as you can go skiing every weekend in winter and beach life every day in spring and summer, with great food which cost way less, and any art exhibition around you is easily reachable with a cheap flight.
Fresh produce are ridiculously expensive, fresh fish the same. Even if you eat seasonally.
Can't comment on the weather in NZ, but we had a fair share of crappy weather in Sydney as well. For years. House quality is a joke. Never felt so cold. DH is Swedish and in Sweden, indoors you live in t-shirt in winter, even when you have a meter of snow outside. Many times I go to someone's house for bookclub or coffee, and more than once, I have kept my coat on. And three years of La Niña ! Australia under water is no fun at all.
On the education front, I find the school curriculum like Swiss cheese compared to the French system. We complement the learning at home. Kids are in the extension classes, but even those are seriously thin on content and challenge. I don't mind doing extra stuff with them because I believe education doesn't happen at school only. Geography knowledge is by far the worst. History follows no specific order and is more a deep dive into a topic that a chronological order. Nothing pre-roman, so Mesopotamia, the birth of writing, even the different pre-historical Homos . Scary. Shakespeare is done every single year in High School, which I find very odd because in France, every school year is a century, so you do all the authors, poets and play writer of that century. You wouldn't do Molière again and again and again.
It is very safe and friendly. Nobody is going to steal my bag at the beach if I go for a swim, which you can't do in Italy, France, Spain, .... During the bushfires , my neighbours came to educate me on fire plan, and everyone says hello and how are you. However it is a very lonely place and I found it hard to make friends.
I admit, I am homesick, more so now than I was in the early years. In my experience, having lived through posting in several countries, it is the people that make a move successful. The connections, the friends, doing stuff with someone, a beautiful beach and view do not really matter after a while.