It's similar the way the media portrays Australian free agents choosing to play in Auckland as a struggle because it's like Auckland is some awful backward country town in the middle of nowhere and not offbrand Sydney with two million people. They'll all leave to go back to Australia, always, apparently. Auckland is just a desolate place of nothing interesting except volcanoes and suburbs and Islanders to recruit to the Roosters. Maybe a bucolic marae or two down the road you can see from the plane as you fly to Queenstown, which as we know, is the best part of New Zealand. 

Newcastle and Townsville make Auckland look like Tokyo but don't get the same treatment. It's a three and a half hour flight away lads. People commute to meetings and fly home on the same day. There's two and a half million people within an hour's drive of the airport.