Okay, there’s this weird thing that happened in the history of the English language called the Great Vowel Shift. It’s the reason English pronounces vowels differently than all the other European languages. (It’s also the reason in Shakespeare plays where he uses one pronunciation of a word to rhyme with something in one line and then uses a different pronunciation of the same word to rhyme differently in a later line. The shift was just ending in Elizabethan times and vowel pronunciations were still unstable.)
It’s almost like that process just kept going in New Zealand. The “a” and “i” and “e” are even farther forward in the mouth than an English, let alone Continental languages. (Thus the “airbag” confusion.)
I was slightly shocked how often I had to ask Kiwis to repeat themselves just so I could parse their accent.