Revisiting zombie towns: Can you have a good life in the provinces?

What sets heartland New Zealand apart is how tightknit it can be and its incredible nature - a sanctuary amid the rise of polarisation and anger.

The South Otago High School prizegiving is joyous.

Balclutha's brand new community hall is overflowing. The district's diversity is on full noise - haka, choir, Samoan performance.

This is also where young lives diverge.

Head girl Annelise Bisset always planned to leave. She is off to Otago to study law.

"I just wanted to go out and spread my wings a wee bit."

Elri Geldenhuyse is staying. The local accounting firm will put her through her qualification, while she works - no student loan.

"It's the first big steppingstone in life."

That is hope, through and through.

Others struggle.

About a third go to university. For the rest, the school gets them out to try things.

Josh Shore does two days a week on the building course at Big River Homes.

"It gives me options."

It's not perfect, but rather than force kids down pathways that don't fit, they look for the pathway that suits the kid. For Big River, it's both giving back and the best recruitment tool.

In Tokoroa, I meet Memphis Rangiwhakawa riding a very loud, pimped out bike around town. He had dropped out of school.

On paper, he is a NEET statistic (not in employment, education or training), but a relative runs the local YMCA and Memphis comes in for a chat.

A week later, he was on a course in Rotorua. Since then, he has landed a full-time job in civil roading through a council procurement scheme, says uncle Paniora Daniels.

Julius Daniels, who runs the YMCA, is blunt about the work.

"All those young people that fall through the gaps and there's no-one there to pick them up, we're the people at the bottom of that hill."

These kids are known. They aren't a statistic.

Local, bespoke and patient efforts work, and it's not just money, although that matters, and swings year to year and political term to term.

What seems to make a real difference was care, relationships and time.

By getting a life, I mean community life - the social fabric that mends the sharp edges, when the invisible hand of the market works alone.

Joyce Beck is principal of the local school.

"Nothing happens in the town without Joyce," Evan Dick tells me. "She's got the mana."

Her mother had a line for it: "Service is the rent we pay for our place in this world."

• Watch the series: Zombie Towns

Whether it's Evan, Joyce or Julius, there are locals who step up and get on with it.

They can't do it alone, but that local leadership and ownership gives an idea both currency and persistence.

Julius on what Wellington offers instead: "You see a handout there, a $2 million bailout there. Those things won't work in communities like ours."

I have a secret mission - an antidote to the polarisation wrecking our communities and politics. Annelise sees it.

"It's almost as if someone has a different opinion than you, they're just wrong."

Bill de la Mare, who grew up here, has the antidote.

"You're not just an individual, you're actually part of something bigger."

The invisible hand of the market deserves some of the credit for Balclutha - dairy prices rose, Auckland priced people out and migrants came for the work, but it took the invisible fabric of the community to turn cheap sections and a thousand vacancies into homes and jobs.

The most surprising lesson for me is that the invisible fabric of society and the invisible hand of the market are not in competition. They are a powerful combination.

Would I still call these places zombie towns? Less so, but not all places will thrive without concerted action.

The irony is that the country now looks more like the zombie, with weak productivity and our young heading to Australia. Part of the cure is local.

As Julius puts it: "I love how we show up when we need to show up."

In the final episode, I'm back in Tokoroa, asking whether Balclutha's lessons can travel.

I meet Eva Hakansson, a world land speed recordholder, who moved her business from Auckland ,because "rent was just eating us alive", and Warwick Batley, who builds forestry machines for export on land that costs a fraction of Hamilton's.

I ask what I really missed 10 years ago.