Hi Prophecy and
Here's a link to the
NZ Dept. of Conservation which might give you a lead to finding conservation work. It's worth a try. If they can't take you on themselves perhaps they can point you in the right direction.
You're right when you say there's a dearth of NZ wildlife forums and a lot of wildlife reserves are looking mainly for volunteers. I suspect the trick is to find out what sort of places do actually pay you to work there and look for similar organisations around the country. I've looked at several wildlife parks but they all seem to take only volunteers.