Hi there,

Well its about time telecom got some decent tec folk in, its DIRE on dial up. Rural folks out here cant get a good connection because the electric fences keep shutting them out! So are you going to be working out how to get the donkey on the dial up treadmill working faster or making a virtual donkey with nanobots? As for broadband, just dont get me started!

However, I digress. Back to your questions

yes you can use a UK licence, you can drive over here for up to 1 year on it and no probs with renting or buying. We needed to show our passports for registering a car the first time. The kiwi licence test is just a multiple choice paper one for poms, a quick rummage through the road code should be fine.

No you can't use your uk tv out here for terrestrial TV, apparently the channels here are outside the tuning range of a pommie TV, but if you wanted to use satellite out here that should be ok. Yes it is PAL, DVD equipment you buy here is usually multi-region.

Getting credit, like anywhere else if you have a job or money its not too hard. Bear in mind mortgages are in excess of 9%. When we first came out and wanted to get things like electricity sorted out for our rental I remember I had to agree to pay a small bond if we terminated our contract in the first year. You can set up bank accounts here from the uk (we used National Bank who had foreign currency accounts readily available) We got EFTPOS and visa cards straight away. As for the rest of it, e.g. buying furniture from harvey normans etc once you have an address and a couple of months utility bills you can pretty much do anything.