A young, browner future for NZ

“You can’t just assume that demographic shift will translate into a shift in economic or political power

Dr Tahu Kukutai

When Māori started moving into urban areas in the 1950s and 60s in large numbers, some Pākehā made it very clear they didn’t want brown neighbours, particularly if they were poor. They complained to Māori Affairs, they built high fences to block out the sight of Māori next door, they sold up and moved, they tried to block subdivisions being sold to Māori. Residents, real estate agents, landlords and even government agencies made it difficult for Māori to find accommodation in certain areas. Eventually a virtual, unofficial but real segregation emerged that persists in the demographics of where certain groups live today.

Fast forward to the 21st Century and many of the Pākehā who grew up in the 50s and 60s are trying to maintain the world as they know it and keep those unofficial boundaries in place. The language might not be as explicit, but it is often extreme and almost comically irrational.

Take Christine Fletcher, former Auckland mayor and National MP and current city councillor. When National supported the Labour government’s plans to change housing intensification rules in Auckland, Fletcher was beside herself. The changes allowed multi-storey building throughout Auckland. These changes were akin to rape, Fletcher said. 

When this was challenged, she doubled-down – it was gang-rape because National and Labour were supporting the changes, she said. Not only was she being attacked by that other gang, but by her own tribe. The shrill tone wasn’t so much tossing toys out of a sandpit as not wanting anyone else to be in any sandpit nearby.

Fletcher’s reaction, although general and on the broad issue of more intense housing rather than race, was eerily similar to the objections of Pākehā of her parents’ generation were making in the 1950s and 60s when Māori were moving into their neighbourhood. The complaints then would often hide an underlying racism by using language about how Māori moving in would change the “character” or “tone” of certain areas. Fletcher’s defence in the 2020s context was that the rule change would “plunder” the landscape.

But Fletcher is not alone or exceptional in this. Plans by Kainga Ora for social housing in Kerikeri in Northland were met with similar outrage, although the language wasn’t quite as hyperbolic. Going by the number of grey heads at the public meetings it was the same Pākehā Baby Boomers who were driving the opposition. The composition of the audience attending the meetings had a similarity to the campaign meetings of National, ACT and NZ First.

In both responses the intention was clear – change didn’t belong in their neighbourhood and they were going to do everything they could to make sure it stayed that way. The objections might not even mention Māori, but it was and is about exclusion, about protecting something of monetary value. The mere suggestion of the presence of someone not quite like them or public housing or cheaper homes posed a perceived threat to that value.

The generation of Pākehā Baby Boomers has been led to believe that it should be at the centre of political and economic decision-making, largely because it has had the dominant numbers throughout every stage of their lives.

But the dominance of Pākehā Baby Boomers now poses a political and economic problem that can no longer be ignored. This generation is going to start costing the country as it heads into retirement and becomes a heavier burden on the health system. The number of Pākehā coming through from the next generations will not be enough to replace them in numbers or tax revenue as those costs mount up.

Instead the numbers of Māori and Pasifika will continue to grow steadily because of the younger age structures and higher fertility rates of these populations. The projected rate of natural increase for Pākehā will head into negative numbers by 2040 (200 years on from the Treaty of Waitangi) and the only thing that will keep the number of Pākehā overall from also dropping will be a modest number of immigrants and other ethnicities that also identify as Pākehā.

While racial categories are something of an artificial construct, particularly with intermarriage and the overlap and merging of different groups, the numbers are clear – the growth rates for Māori and Polynesians are significantly larger and will only increase.

But will the incoming government address the needs of the growing number of Māori so they get to enjoy the same life choices that Pākehā Baby Boomers have enjoyed throughout their lifetime? More to the point, will the next generation of Māori and Pasifika be in a healthy economic position so the country’s tax revenues can pay for the kind of retirement and healthcare system that Pākehā Baby Boomers are expecting? Or will this government continue to assume that brown people will continue to languish in statistics that show them lagging behind in key social and economic indicators?

When the coalition government announced its Cabinet line-up a notable but overlooked detail was the portfolios for old and young people – ACT’s Karen Chhour was appointed Minister for Children and Minister for the Prevention of Family and Sexual Violence, but she is outside Cabinet. NZ First’s Casey Costello is Minister for Seniors and is inside Cabinet.

National seems prepared to offer Pākehā Baby Boomers a gold-plated retirement but has said very little about what it is going to do to make sure the brown workforce of the next generation will be in a position to fund that promise. Like politicians of the post-war period, politicians are still assuming Māori will occupy the bottom rung of the economic ladder.

“National knows the best way to increase super payments is to grow the economy,” said National’s finance spokesperson Nicola Willis. “The last National government grew super at twice the rate of inflation. That’s what a growing economy and low inflation does.

“National values the contribution seniors have made to the country and we will make sure they are looked after in their retirement.”

What she didn’t explain is how the Government will pay for that retirement for Pākehā Baby Boomers when it seems determined to ignore the increasing numbers of brown kids that will be the ones paying for it.

How does Nicola Willis expect to grow the economy when the greatest resource is the next generation, which will be increasingly Māori? Does she accept it as inevitable that young Māori and Pacific people will have a lesser quality of education, health, housing and employment than Pākehā Baby Boomers experienced over their lifetime? What contribution does she think they can make?

It would be inaccurate to portray all Pākehā Baby Boomers as greedy, selfish, entitled narcissists who own more than their share of property and expect local and central government to kowtow to their every whim.  The group is too large and diverse to make such sweeping generalisations.

But the regular news coverage of groups and individuals like Christine Fletcher and those in Kerikeri show there’s obviously more than a few that could fit that descriptor. And they make enough noise to hold the attention of political decision-makers and the media. 

While these questions are partly about who holds economic resources, they’re more about who holds sway over political power. Act leader David Seymour wants to have a referendum on the Treaty of Waitangi.

But why should people who won’t be around for more than 30 years at the most get to determine the shape of the country’s constitution for future generations of children, particularly brown children? Even today’s Pākehā youth have quite different attitudes to their parents and grandparents and are far more aware of the country’s history.

But while constitutional issues might be important, they’re in the abstract for most people.

The issue of housing is a more useful lens to view these questions through as it’s a basic tangible need for everyone, but also a measure of attitudes around both economic and political power. It is also the most obvious example of how Pākehā Baby Boomers have distorted the conversation around both. To liken a one-rule-for-all on property development to gang rape, or that social housing in Northland – one of the poorest regions in the country – is the end of civilisation suggests there’s a few people haven’t got enough to complain about.

While these examples could be interpreted as inordinate media attention given to a limited group, the numbers suggest otherwise.  To be more specific, the number of dollars.

RNZ’s Farah Hancock carried out an analysis of the donations to political parties and found the biggest chunk of money was given by those with interests in the property sector and most of that money – around $2.4 million – went to the three parties of the incoming government. 

So the property sector has spent the most money of any sector lobbying the three parties that are now forming a government and those parties have already indicated they are going to favour those who already own property. And again, the group of New Zealanders that own a disproportionate percentage of property are old and white.

Many Pākehā Baby Boomers inherited the Kiwi myth that housing was security, almost a New Zealand birth-right. But now they also regard housing as a major investment option and many have used the equity of their homes and the cheap credit that banks are more willing to lend on housing than business.

For the next generation of Māori, or Pākehā for that matter, housing is not secure and home ownership is increasingly perceived as an unattainable luxury. Meanwhile, rents are taking larger and larger chunks out of people’s incomes, incomes that have remained sluggish.

Māori home ownership had always lagged behind Pākehā rates in the post-war period, but had been steadily climbing until the upheavals of the 1980s. From the 1990s onwards it has been declining (although there has been a slight improvement in recent years). While Māori employment has diversified since the 50s and 60s, Māori are still disproportionately in jobs that are low-paid.  Nearly 20 percent of the Māori workforce are in labouring occupations (it’s closer to 24 percent for Māori men), compared to just over 11 percent of the non-Māori workforce.  At the other end, around 16 percent of the Māori workforce (it’s lower for males) are in the professions while it sits at 23 percent for non-Māori.

Currently the median income for Pākehā is $34,600 and 10.8 percent earn between $70-100k, while the median income for Māori is $24,300 while 6.8 percent earn between $70-100k.  18.2 percent of Pākehā have no qualifications while 13.3 percent have a bachelor’s degree or Level 7 qualification. For Māori, 25.3 percent have no qualification while 8.4 percent have a bachelor’s degree or Level 7 qualification.

While Māori education and employment diversity have improved over the past 50 years, the stats still show that Māori are in no way on par with Pākehā. 

These kinds of disparities were not regarded by the parties of the incoming government as important, let alone campaigned on as issues to be addressed.

But these kinds of numbers will influence the kinds of decisions that need to be made by any government, because the next generation of Pākehā won’t be able to pay for the cost of an ageing generation of Pākehā on their own.

Successive governments have increasingly been farming out social programmes to the private sector, creating industries that are not only profiting but are dependent on social problems that are never really fixed because business would dry up if they were.

For some, Government spending is fine if it’s going into the right pockets.

Expect the incoming government to come up with a private sector solution to the problem of housing that will advantage a number of private sector interests.

But the housing problem has become structural over the past several decades and no politician has been willing to confront the issue head-on.

“If you happened to be lucky enough to have a house 20 years ago, you’re living in clover. You didn’t? You’re screwed – absolutely screwed. The Government doesn’t even want to fix it”

Dr Don Brash, 2016

“I cannot see how indefinitely we can continue in cloud cuckoo land. That’s where we are now,” the NZ Herald reported Brash saying at the time.

Former Reserve Bank chief economist Arthur Grimes said around the same time that the Government should try to crash house prices in Auckland by 40 per cent over five years, something Prime Minister John Key dismissed as “crazy”. According to Treasury figures, New Zealanders currently have $347 billion in debt tied up in housing, more than the debt from all other sectors combined and just over $100 billion more than in 2016 when Don Brash first made his comments about over-priced housing. Just over $90 billion of the current housing debt figure – more than a quarter – was borrowed by property investors.

Total Bank Loans by Purpose

But Brash agreed with Grimes suggestion.

“Arthur spelt it out very bluntly but what he was saying was absolutely right – you cannot get affordable housing arithmetically, if you like, without a fall in prices – or wait half a century,” Brash said.

“If you could hold house prices static for half a century and have nominal incomes growing at say 3 per cent, you might get back to a reasonable relationship over half a century.”

“In the meantime, two generations are locked out of housing.”

Brash, who was Governor of the Reserve Bank from 1988 to 2002, said people are quick to point out an increase in income inequality over the past 20 years – but New Zealand’s wealth divide has been driven by house prices.

What Brash was effectively saying was that the market had failed and governments of both sides were unwilling to make structural changes to the legislation and drivers to address it.

While he identified that there were people who were locked out of home ownership, he didn’t mention that it was his own generation and cohort that was the voting bloc the politicians were terrified of offending.

The problem was actually looking at him in the mirror. If he wanted to name a group that was getting special – or favoured – policy treatment by the government, it wasn’t Māori, it was Pākehā in his age group.

Baby Boomers who own their own house have been able to leverage their equity to buy investment properties that have been inflated by cheap debt, lax regulation and a tax regime that favours this form of investment. Successive governments have been too scared to move against this market distorting behaviour. The incoming government shows every sign of continuing in this direction and would have been encouraged to do so by political supporters and donors.

National has promised to look after the “squeezed middle”, but makes no real mention of those who are being crushed at the bottom. One of the convenient, in-built articles of neoliberal faith is that success is all down to individual effort or personal failure. Poverty is a moral failure and has nothing to do with the failure of the market or the government that is supposed to govern for everyone.

But this logic also allows racist language to be replaced with a different kind of classification. If you’re poor and brown and can’t afford to even rent a decent house then it’s because you’ve made bad lifestyle choices and are a moral failure and the state needs to discipline you.

Locking up the Future

“The lack of understanding of any boundaries on their rights as Police to photograph members of the public is particularly concerning.”

Report from Independent Police Complaints Authority and Privacy Commissioner 2023

This year the rhetoric from not only National and ACT but also Labour has ramped up about incarcerating those who offend when young. David Seymour said it out loud – “there needs to be more people in prison.” He promised to spend half a billion on a youth prison that would be run by Corrections.

Luxon was beating much the same drum, threatening consequences for children involved in ram-raids or not attending school to look for work, without considering that the two issues might be related.

(I requested interviews with Seymour, Luxon and Hipkins before the election.  Seymour’s press secretary asked what the questions would be and when told it was about Seymour’s comments about Māori, declined. Luxon’s and Hipkin’s offices did not reply.)

The repeated sub-text on the campaign trail was that there was this threat to society called Māori children. None of those suggesting it seemed to reflect on the evidence given in the Royal Commission of Inquiry into Abuse in Care where dozens of Māori adults testified to how the state’s intervention when they were children wrecked their lives and caused intergenerational trauma and harm. 

Instead of highlighting these issues there’s a political fixation on things like the Treaty of Waitangi, without any substantive discussion about what it means or its relevance beyond a series of soundbites. But consider how much treaty settlements actually cost and what they achieve versus the cost of an ageing Pākehā population. Treaty settlements were originally capped at $1 billion and only tipped over that figure recently. It had taken over 150 years and generations of fighting for justice to achieve any recognition of breaches of the treaty – it was officially regarded as a nullity for around a century. But for an iwi like Ngāti Porou, the settlement works out at about $1500 per person, which wouldn’t cover your rent in Auckland for a month.

Christopher Luxon’s former employer Air New Zealand has been bailed out by the taxpayer over the last couple of decades in amounts that run into the billions, but no-one has repeatedly suggested this is going to bankrupt the country or that the national airline needs to be scrapped.

Despite what Treaty settlements have actually cost, the Treaty gets far more negative attention than the cost of superannuation which is already costing $11 billion a year and is likely to hit $20 billion by 2030. That doesn’t include health costs that will come with an ageing population.

These issues have been largely ignored by a whole generation of leaders in the Baby Boomer cohort. But what may be more of a problem is the next generation of Pākehā, Generation X, who might assume that they should enjoy the same political and economic dominance as their parents without understanding or acknowledging that the status quo is changing. They won’t have the numbers their parents did but will they still hold the same assumptions of entitlement? This is the generation of Jacinda Ardern, Chris Hipkins, Chris Luxon and David Seymour.

While this group of leaders were intensely focused on shoring up votes in the middle, particularly those of Baby Boomers, Labour lost the vote of a younger generation of Māori to Te Pāti Māori. In the Māori seats Labour got a shellacking, losing six of the seven seats. But the power of the Māori electorate is essentially masked by the numbers being split between the Māori and the General rolls, particularly in regional areas like Northland, Bay of Plenty, East Coast and Hawke’s Bay with high Māori populations.

Candidates in the general seats in these areas can ignore the Māori in their electorates and still get elected. There are also over 400,000 eligible voters who aren’t even registered and it’s likely to be those who are on the margins. Parties have yet to learn that soon they won’t be able to ignore Māori voters and assume they’ll be elected. It’s doubtful it has sunk in for Labour yet either.

The other group that aren’t paying attention to the demographic shift is the media. Mainstream media management and the political media are still dominated by Pākehā and operate on the assumption their core audience is Pākehā and will continue to be so. Going by the selection and shaping of stories, a huge section of the media is still tying its fortunes to Baby Boomers, which is not exactly a forward-looking business strategy.

There have been tentative shifts but the issues facing the next generations of New Zealanders are underreported, or Māori issues are often framed as some kind of controversy or threat.

There are also growing numbers of Māori children and youth coming through who have been through kohanga reo and kura kaupapa and are confident and assertive in their identity as Māori in ways that previous generations weren’t.

But not only are the mainstream media reporting a distorted and incomplete picture of New Zealand society, they’re also missing out on a future business opportunity and the possibilities and talent that young Māori and Polynesian personnel might bring to their businesses.  Or businesses throughout the economy.

The Browning Workforce

“All love to white people, but you know, their days are done.”

barry soutar

“You can’t just assume that demographic shift will translate into a shift in economic or political power. But it certainly is one of the major levers for change. But how that change plays out is anyone’s guess. But when it comes to workforce, it’s actually really important.

“Because when you think about Gisborne, 80 percent of the tamariki population, which is future workers, that’s going to be Māori. So that’s a lot. And that’s by the early 2030s. That’s already almost approaching 70 percent. So that has massive implications for the future workforce,” she says.

Barry Soutar has worked in IT overseas and in New Zealand and moved to Gisborne (he grew up on the East Coast) to create tech jobs for the next generation of Māori.

“The advent of these technologies will be a societal disrupter. There will be jobs that are made redundant. But we’ve been through this before. It’s an opportunity if we front foot with our young Māori in regions like Gisborne.”

He doesn’t see the kind of leadership in the political or business world that will meet the changing demands that technology and demography are posing.

“Our problem is that New Zealand being one of the remotest countries from markets is that we don’t know that we’re dying. You don’t know death by 1000 cuts until around about the 950th. We are so insulated away from the markets that we don’t hear the conversations in the marketplace about why we’re losing until we’ve lost.”

He says the changes that technology will bring to the world of work have to be considered alongside the changes in demography, and primary sector industries like forestry won’t provide anywhere near enough jobs to employ the growing number of Māori.

“Forestry cannot be our number one industry. And in a place like Gisborne, that message needs to be hammered home hard, because it has been so destructive for this region. The idea of manual labor in that way is ending. Technology will change that dynamic.

“Here in Gisborne, just inside the city is 53 percent Māori. The majority of this town is Māori. Forecasts by Statistics New Zealand is that 70 percent of Gisborne City will be Māori by 2040. That’s an opportunity. It’s an opportunity for a new style of leadership, a new form of leadership that’s informed by the values of a culture that is a little bit different to the Anglo Saxon culture that’s holds the power base in towns like Gisborne. And it’s time to disrupt that.

“And it’s time for Māori to change their way of thinking as well. Because the problem is we’re coming out of 30 years of treaty settlement with just a straight adversarial sort of game. And we’ve lost the purpose and the reason why we went down the track. So the people who were the leaders of the war, are never the right people to be leading the peace. So we need a new generation of leadership that recognizes the real value of the culture. Because it’s highly inappropriate for the leadership of this town to be anything but reflective of that demography.”

Soutar says Pākehā have to realise that the political and economic dominance of white people has peaked and is waning, not just in New Zealand but globally.

“All love to white people, but you know, their days are done. And this just happens all around the planet. It’s nothing new here. It’s about how do you embrace it. And how do you actually then engage with it?”

“Some 40 percent of the workforce under 35 in New Zealand over the next 20 years is going to be Māori or Pacific.

len cook

The first front might be addressing the long-standing inequities in the education system.

Len Cook says these inequities pose a risk to the future employment prospects of Māori and Polynesian kids who are going to make up a larger proportion of the workforce.

“Some 40 percent of the workforce under 35 in New Zealand over the next 20 years is going to be Māori or Pacific. The risk we have with an ageing population is that if we keep increasing the pensions, we crowd out the education needs of that group. What we know is that Māori and Pacific children generally live in areas of deprivation in New Zealand, which also tend to be less well served by the education system.

“If you look at science teachers in New Zealand, if you’ve got a top decile school, say in Remuera, 100 percent of the science lessons will be taught by a science graduate. If you go to a secondary school in the bottom decile, you’ll be lucky to find half the science lessons taught by a science graduate. I think one of the big things that we keep poorly analysing is the quality of the services that we think are common to everyone and how they’re spread out in the different decile areas of New Zealand. And to me, that’s a huge issue.”

Stats NZ has predicted that: “the share of children who are Māori is projected to increase from 27 percent in 2018 to 33 percent (about 1 in 3 children) in 2043. In comparison, the total Māori population is projected to grow from 17 percent of New Zealand’s population to 21 percent over the same period.”

Cook also points out that the Baby Boomers as a population are going to increasingly be a drag on the economy as they not only hit retirement but as their health costs increase.

“It’s going to have a huge impact on our taxes. And the net effect is that between now and 2040 we will have about a 30 percent less capability to fund what we do in government.”

NZ Statistics projections show that the percentage of the population over 65 is about to overtake the percentage that are 14 or under. The over-65 percentage will continue to increase to more than 20 percent by 2040 while the percentage of children 14 or under will drop to under 15 percent in the same period.

The demographic challenges facing New Zealand are common in many parts of the world.

Indeed, there are signs that demography is going to be one of the key factors political and business leaders are going to have to grapple with globally, alongside disruptions caused by technology and climate change.

While petty phrases disparaging “woke” behaviours are bandied around, the real future of the country and the challenges that our children will face are bereft of actual leadership.

New Zealand is in the unique position of having a growing segment of the population that is not based on immigration – Māori and Pasifika – but the public conversation portrays this group as a deficit rather than a massive potential dividend.

Thus far the country at large doesn’t seem that concerned about what those kids are inheriting in terms of an economy and environment that looks increasingly unsustainable.

“A lot of Pakeha haven’t quite got their heads around that demographic shift. But I think there’ll be these other external factors that also impact on that.”

Dr Maria Bargh

“A lot of Pakeha haven’t quite got their heads around that demographic shift. But I think there’ll be these other external factors that also impact on that.”

“I just think that the global climate crisis situation and AI are two aspects that we don’t even really know how they’re going to unfold. I think they are of a magnitude that we almost can’t comprehend, but I think are going to be hugely significant to the way we live, how we make decisions, who gets to make decisions, and how we live good lives.”

“Foreign ownership of our nationally strategic assets I think is a concern, particularly if a lot of the settings within government are still encouraging and enthusiastic about the idea of foreign direct investment.

“When other places become uninhabitable, or crops are not able to be grown in other places, there will be states looking for places where they can grow food and where they can live.”

“Those states that have National Food strategies, part of that is purchasing land in other parts of the world where things grow to feed the home state.”

But if New Zealand governments are focused on serving the interests of Pākehā Baby Boomer voters, then the sale of the country’s key property assets could accelerate. Take housing and farms. A large percentage of these assets are held by this group and much of that ownership was based on debt levels that have been jacked up over the past two decades. When those owners want to cash up they’re going to expect to get more than they paid, but the next generation of homeowners and farmers are finding it more and more difficult to pay the prices being asked. That is even more so for the increasing number of Māori.

Increasingly the only buyers who will be able to afford these assets will be limited to overseas buyers.

By 2016 dairy debt stood at around $37.9 billion. According to the Reserve Bank, an estimated 49 per cent of the dairy sector was operating below the break-even point in the 2014-15 season and 80 per cent of farmers were in negative cashflow in the 2015-16 season. Dairy sector debt currently sits at just under $37 billion.

What has this got to do with demographics? Quite a bit. Those who took out that debt are hitting retirement, and there could be a glut of farms up for sale and not enough younger farmers who can pay what the older generation and their bankers will demand. Because Fonterra is owned by farm suppliers if those farms are bought up by overseas interests then Fonterra’s ownership will go with it. The farmer-owned co-op and the farms that supply it will get eaten one bite at a time until they are a product in a foreign investment portfolio.

Taken together with the housing market, the transfer of the wealth held by Pākehā Baby Boomers could be a transfer of that wealth offshore. But there’s nothing new here – historian Peter Meihana says New Zealand has a long and unhealthy history of financial speculation going back to the 19th century.

“The New Zealand Company was based on speculation. Selling houses to rich foreigners, that’s all speculation, but that’s just what New Zealand does. There’s no thinking.”

This transfer of wealth has a long history – the NZ Loans Act that was passed shortly after the Land Wars allowed the colonial government to borrow against the collateral of Māori land. The development of the country was built on the premise of theft, not just of land but of the wealth of future generations of Māori.

It is not just overseas investors that are shaping the future of the country our children will enter as adults. Overseas demographic trends are going to impact on New Zealand too. While China and Japan have been concerned for some time about how their ageing populations will affect productivity internally, these shifts will also influence New Zealand’s economy.

While these countries are shifting to a demographic decline, other regions of the world will be growing, notably India and Africa. Is the incoming government prepared for the changes this will bring?

One of the policy levers governments have been using over the last three decades is immigration. It’s virtually the only way to significantly change the trajectory of the country’s demographics, but what are the objectives and what are the down-sides? 

If the results are anything to go by it might prop up the GDP, but it can increase house prices while suppressing wages. How is that going to address the cost of living for those already here? If it’s to fill labour shortages, then why are there still so many shortages in key sectors?

But while these big questions weren’t being asked let alone answered, over the last election campaign, politicians were whipping up a narrative that Māori were gaining some kind of privilege that had to be halted.

Attempts to address health or education inequities were being portrayed as some kind of separatism, but separate from what? The numbers show there is already a division and the incoming government has not given credible answers to address those real divisions rather than the politicking of an election campaign. (National is now going to pay for its tax cuts by rolling back a policy to reduce tobacco use. Increased deaths, including of Māori, could be the price of paying for an election promise.)

The incoming government has not campaigned on fixing the health, education or housing issues of Māori but can say a lot about Māori privilege. The disparities are consistent with indigenous peoples in other colonised countries. The difference in New Zealand is that Māori make up and will increasingly make up a higher percentage of the total population than indigenous people in those other countries, which means those disparities can’t be so easily ignored.

Peter Meihana says the false portrayal of “Māori privilege” in the 19^th century caused Māori real damage and could do so again at a very moment when real inequities need to be addressed. And not just for the sake of Māori, but for the sake of the future of the country.

“In the 19th century it led to land alienation. Well, of course, Māori don’t have any land anymore. What you get now is the very same arguments but for another purpose. And that is simply to basically constrain Māori. All of these initiatives that have been put in place to advance Māori development, claims of Māori privilege are used again to try and get rid of those. So I can kind of see a number of Māori initiatives heading for the block.”

From a statistical point of view, the assertion that Māori are privileged is absurd.

“It’s just stupid,” says Len Cook, who has spent his entire career immersed in the numbers. “It represents a degree of racial prejudice that’s not based on analysis.”

Kukutai says political leaders haven’t yet grasped the change that is happening and are going to not only miss out on opportunities but stifle the opportunities for young Māori because of their blinkered, short-term outlook.

“I think there’s an undeniable aspect to Anglo colonisation, Anglo settler states or whatever the nomenclature is, of deeply ingrained racial superiority. That was part of the colonial project. How that’s expressed shifts over time, but it doesn’t disappear.”

Barry Soutar has encountered racism both here and overseas and says the problem is with the racist, who is usually white. 

Of Gisborne, he says: “You’d be horrified at how racist the thinking is around this place. And how they have all of these processes in place to protect their way of doing things and who amongst their friends are going to get the funds and money for development in this town. This is normal. Racism is a norm.

“The kind of MAGA mentality of let’s make Gisborne great again, I’ve only got one word to say to that kind of mentality and thinking – Bye-Bye. Your days are done.”

• Made with support from the Public Interest Journalism Fund