>Reading through today’s Age, I discovered that apparently there’s been another one of those World’s Most Livable/Quality of Life City surveys, and the results are now out:
Sydney placed 10th. (Still too spread out for me.)
Melbourne placed 18th. (Ouch!)
Perth placed 21st. (Where?)
Adelaide placed 30th. (again, where?)
Brisbane placed 34th! (must be all that corruption).
But the real kicker is that Auckland placed 4th. (And Wellington placed 12th!)
New York placed 49th.
I truly wonder what is their criteria. I know this survey is mostly interested in sizing up each city for the sake of ex-pat workers, so the cheap cost of living might have sent Auckland higher up the charts, but it. is. still. NZ.
A country where coverage of what happens elsewhere garners more coverage than anything that happens inside its borders…mostly because nothing happens there. The local section of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel makes Milwaukee sound more titilating than the National section of the NZ Herald does for the entire country of New Zealand. (You can almost sense that they’re glad there are a couple of Swine Flu cases in NZ, so they can scream “we’re relevant!” to the rest of the world.)
TVNZ’s coverage of the rankings is noticeably modest, although one could read a bit of Trans-Tasman smugness into it, somewhat.
>is anyone actually stupid enough to make a decision on where to live based on a survey? i have to think that these surveys are mostly for filling newspaper column inches.
>Apparently multinational companies are.