Even in the Links I fly with FOs who stayed the moral path and some of them rely on govt aid to feed the kids
This says it all really. The simple fact is if you want to get into this industry in NZ there are two choices.
(1) GA and poverty.
(2) Jetstar and poverty.
The big picture is do you really want to be involved in this industry? Phoenix says he wants to do the the best by his family (I read this to be income) then he would be best served by training in many other industries (resources industry in Oz are paying multiples of an NZ FO) & fly for pleasure. To enter this industry now is for vanity or the already wealthy. There is almost zero prospect of anything other than a hand-to-mouth existence in NZ, and likely in Aus unless you already have command experience. Unfortunately the best of this industry has already past for new entrants.
My advise would be to avoid it like the plague, to not enter it in the first place. Many of my colleges are studying so they can leave the industry, they see the writing on the wall. If you decide that you want to fly for the "love of it" then understand exactly what you are getting into.
edit: Bongo, you are already in the industry, this is different to being a new entrant looking in. The real question here is to enter the industry or not.
Here's a quote from a thread I started 18 months ago on the Europe situation:
What Bean-Counters really think of pilots. (
original post)
As to our profession, well I had a great time but its finished, really finished. I derive no joy from saying that. A friend of mine told me about a dinner he went to where there was an advisor in economics to the "brightly coloured" airline board, (a social accident - he did not know him before or fix it up, his friends he went with did). He told me that this guy was fascinating. His contempt for pilots knew no bounds and he expounded gleefully on the summer-only contracts he forsaw and the increasing contractorisation of piloting overall, where contractors bid for the work the brand generated and the lowest cost base won. He looked whistfully at Eastern Europe as a great source of cheap pilots and said supply easily exceeded demand for the forseeable future. His view was that flying an airliner was a slightly more sophisticated train driver style job and said, bluntly, that some train drivers now earned more than pilots, which was as it should be in his view, especially for FO's who he viewed as a legal requirement but otherwise woefully overpaid for their contribution. This, he predicted would change rapidly and so, it seems, is the case at the brightly coloured airline, as elsewhere.
He admitted, apparently, that airlines were a pretty cosy club through the various trade bodies they belong to and that they all got together to discuss areas of mutual interest like overhead - particularly staff costs. The oil price makes an airline a price taker but salaries are where they can be a price maker, he said, and that they were all determined to drive the status and salaries of piloting through the floor. It was, he felt, a ridiclous "career" to enter as the specialisation was so narrow and the industry itself so vulnerable to external shocks that it was virtually to condemn oneself to a job where opportunities were increasingly limited and salaries shrinking in real terms every year and with little chance to move outside it at a corporate level unless to manage within it, where the focus would inevitably be on who could deliver the cheapest cost base given the total commoditisation of the industry product. That meant being the best at screwing down the earnings of your own peer group. He felt that this was all fair game and that the market was so easy to rig against pilots come any sign of a downturn in the economy that becoming one was the height of folly, but that, never-the-less, plenty of people kept applying so there was little need to adjust the career to attract the best, they would take what they got. Safety cut little ice because, as he put it, "you lot all want to get home to your families at the end of your overpaid day, so the passengers will be fine too."
Personally, I would have wanted to either walk out or punch him on the nose, but my mate stayed, gripped by the depth of the exposition this economics expert who sat on many other boards of other industries as well went on to over the course of their evening.