Salut Tauwi, peut etre je peut t'aider un peu, car je suis 1/2 Australienne et 1/2 Kiwi.
Firstly, I have to say that New Zealand is a country very close to my heart (spent many happy childhood holidays there).
My mother also goes back a lot, though not as much as she used to, because she says her country has changed a lot over the past 10 years especially, in ways she doesn't like.
I think to live in New Zealand (as I have sometimes half considered one day for the distant future) you really need to choose the right place, and our city of Auckland isn't that right place for us any more.
It used to be nice, but now it's a large, congested city compared quite often to Sydney, but without a good transport system or so many attractive sights and tourist attractions to make living there more interesting.
It's like a cross between Sydney and a city in Asia...quite strange, with most signs on buildings in Japanese as well as English (partly because of tourism, partly because of business).
Even many New Zealanders don't consider this city to be New Zealand any more.
Wellington, the capital, I found to be very attractive....on a nice day. If it's not a nice day it's not unusual to get wind of over 100 km/hr, and then it's most unpleasant. So I crossed that off my list too.
Any further south than that seems to have a very short summer...like, from December to the middle of February then straight into winter! (I much prefer even Melbourne's summer December - March and warm autumn till mid or even late April)
By contrast in smaller cities like Rotorua, there is a lot of interesting Maori culture, which is appreciated or at least accepted by the white community too, many of whom speak some Maori (unlike a lot of people living here who don't make the effort to understand Aboriginal culture apart from Art and couldn't speak a single word of any dialect).
The whole country has great scenery (really makes Lord of the Rings have a lot more impact afterwards!) but I much prefer the smaller places (though I'd probably find them too remote) and a much slower way of life than Auckland.
In the South Island, the Maori culture disappears almost completely, apart from Art studios, and it's almost like being in the English countryside or small cities....right down to the red Telephone boxes! Quite amazing. The people even FEEL to be English (in contrast to Australia where we follow USA much more closely).
They seem much stronger Monarchists in general than we are and don't seem to have had the Republic issues that we've been through.
NZ is aligned more with other Pacific nations and wants to be that way. It hasn't the ties with the US and manages to stay out of that political Iraq area a lot (such a nice change when we visited there this February, not to hear weapons of mass destruction debate for a couple of weeks!)
I would say though it's also more 'backward' in many ways than Australia (par exemple, they only introduced photo-drivers licence ID about 10 years ago and time seems to move more slowly there....a bit like in Tasmania, who mainlanders often delight in teasing).
The people (outside Auckland) are friendly like Australians, and perhaps a little more open and caring with it (where a lot of early Australian friendship can be quite superficial, even to my eyes as an 'insider').
For me, the best thing about Australia is the high quality of life that I've searched for and never found in any other country except for Switzerland (but at a price I couldn't afford there
). Also the amount and huge varitey of wildlife that is so easy to have all around you, without even going very far from the cities unless you want to. All the different landscapes that you could want, packed into one state (Victoria most of all, Tasmania perhaps 2nd.)
I hope these ideas help a bit.
If you want to ask some more specific questions, I'd do my best to answer.
Kate
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Je suis certaine que vous savez tous de quoi je parle !!!! 
