A global wave of disillusionment and disenfranchisement has not spared New Zealand, with a majority of respondents to a survey here agreeing that New Zealand society is broken and the country is in decline.
Ipsos New Zealand asked 1001 Kiwis about their hopes for the future and their views of the state of the nation in the final week of February. The results, exclusively obtained by Newsroom, line up with the pollster’s findings from 28 countries overseas: People believe the economy is rigged to benefit the rich and powerful and traditional politicians aren’t doing anything about it.
Three in five respondents told Ipsos that New Zealand society was in decline and that the country is broken, aligning closely with results from overseas. This is the first time New Zealand has been included in this survey, which Ipsos has run elsewhere five times since 2016.
Paul Spoonley, the former director of centre of research excellence He Whenua Taurikura, said the findings align with the long-running Edelman Trust Barometer study, which doesn’t include New Zealand.
“What they’re recording internationally, which is repeated in this Ipsos survey, is a very rapid decline in trust, particularly in governments and in experts, and a decline in the level of social cohesion internationally,” he said.
“What you see repeated in both the Edelman Trust Barometer and the Ipsos survey is this dissatisfaction, but more than that, distrust of leaders, within government or out. Attached to that distrust is a post-Covid pessimism in the collective.”
Ipsos has run the survey overseas in order to detect trends of populism. It asks a number of questions as part of two indices, one about perceptions that the system is broken and one about populism specifically.
For the broken system index, the pollster asks whether people agree with statements like “traditional parties and politicians don’t care about people like me” and “experts in this country don’t understand the lives of people like me”. A majority of New Zealand respondents backed these statements, as well as expressing desire for a “strong leader” to either “take the country back from the rich and powerful” or “break the rules” to get things done.
Then there are the more outrightly populist statements. Here, Ipsos asks whether people agree that “the main divide in our society is between ordinary citizens and the political and economic elite”, whether that elite cares about “hard-working people” and whether the most important political issues should be decided through referendums.
For these statements, a majority of New Zealanders also supported them, again in line with the global average.
Some of our comparator countries, like Australia and Canada, were generally less likely to agree with these statements than New Zealand respondents. Others, like the United Kingdom, were even more pessimistic about the state of affairs in their nations.
Spoonley said that while the term “populism” often carries connotations of a right-wing political movement, that isn’t necessarily what these results are talking about.
“Both right and left are unhappy with government at the moment. It’s labelled as populism here, which tends to suggest a centre-right aversion to government, but there is also an aversion from the left at the moment which I’m not sure I would label as populist,” he said.
Ipsos NZ ran this survey alongside its regular Issues Monitor, which asks about voter history. It found that supporters of the parties currently in Opposition were more likely to agree with most of the broken system statements, while supporters of the Government were more likely to desire a “strong leader willing to break the rules”.
There was, however, no political divide among people saying society is broken and the country is in decline.
Right and left were also equally represented in the one area where New Zealand notably differed from the rest of the world: Views on immigration. Respondents here were marginally less likely to say that employers should prioritise hiring New Zealanders over immigrants when jobs are scarce and significantly less likely than the global average to agree that New Zealand would be stronger if it stopped immigration or that immigrants take jobs from “real” citizens.
“We asked exactly the same questions back in the early 2000s in relation to immigration. When we asked questions about taking away jobs from New Zealanders, the percentage agree/disagree is not very different from the Ipsos figures,” he said.
The people most likely to agree with the statements around a broken system and populism were Māori, low-income workers and young people, Ipsos reported.
“It hints at an underlying disconnect of some groups and some communities in our society, and the way in which they’re perceiving the political elite,” Spoonley said.
While this is the first time Ipsos has asked these questions in New Zealand, other research into attitudes around social cohesion issues has been carried out in the past.
Koi Tū: The Centre for Informed Futures at the University of Auckland has published three reports on social cohesion in recent years, with the first landing during the very early days of the Covid-19 response in May 2020.
“It showed very high levels of social cohesion and I think that social cohesion continued right the way through to the general election and you saw it in the election results,” Spoonley, who helped with that work, said.
“That unravelled, quite spectacularly, in 2021 and 2022. If we jump to the 2023 report, what we found is those high levels of social cohesion and I would suggest trust, particularly trust in government, had literally evaporated over the previous two years. The key indicator of that was the protests that were occurring around New Zealand, most notably in Wellington.”
I am about to turn 60. I have two adult sons with partners who without parental help would have zero chance of buying a home. They have to seriously answer the question whether a home or children lie in their future but both, with student debt, is increasingly not an option. One lives in Brisbane but is heading home to Auckand because homes there are the same cost as Auckland. He earns a salary in Australia that is the same as he will earn in NZ. His thinking is if I come home to NZ at least he will be with family and friends. So why stay in Australia?
I have a real concern that our lack of ambition and aspiration and viewing everything through the lens of the lowest common denominator is going to see us leave the ranks of first world countries. We already cannot afford the things we hold precious. While I believe the last government accelerated that decline they were not solely to blame. I didn’t see the Key/English government do a whole lot of changing either. This decline has been slow and inexorable. While I am all in on stopping our collective tax dollars being wasted and I fully support cutting the increasingly bloated public service (I deal with it every day and the massive increases in staff in recent times has not delivered better services) I fear we keep voting in largely status quo politicians and not ambitious dial moving change agents. In that respect we are signing our own death warrant. The people we elect continue to divide us (perhaps only reflecting who we are increasingly allowing ourselves to become), are too timid to really be effective and until we change who we want in Parliament I fear it is going to be more of the same.
The answer is not moving to Australia as much as I like the place. I spend as much time there and run a business there, as I do here in New Zealand. They are having exactly the same debates, are confronting the exact same future for exactly the same reasons as we are.
The is clearly a general malaise right across the developed world as far as I can tell.
We will only have a better future when we embrace ambition and demand a higher standard in everything of everyone.
And to redress the imbalance between rich and poor it is essential to tax land values. The land is owned by all of us so people who monopolise a site should pay a rent regularly to the rest of us. Otherwise unearned capital gains go to land “owners”.
I do wonder sometimes though Deirdre as we seek to make our society more equitable, something that is good for all of us, if we don’t have a tendency in this country to try and pull everyone down to the same level rather than aspire and support people to lift themselves up. It is so easy to say ‘tax the rich’ but that is too simplistic an argument. As is ‘get everyone off the dole’. It is complex and tax is part of the answer but a bit of individual responsibility goes a long way as well. Parents for their children. Children to go to school and to get an education. To attend school. Stay out of trouble. Treat others as they’d have others treat them. To stop being a victim.
No country has ever taxed its way to prosperity. I feel do feel a certain amount of disillusionment sometimes with this country of ours where everything seems to be someone else’s fault on the one hand and we can just tax our way to prosperity (not suggesting that is your worldview). I worry we have becoming a country of also-rans because we did not expect or demand enough of each and every one of us to contribute as they can. It seems a race to just be very ordinary.
1001 people. A cute number, but it means nothing. It is a very small number and not worth a headline. Whilst I might be tempted to support some of the so called “findings”, that would just be a random opinion. In a population of 5 million and growing 1001 people are hardly a representative cross section.It is 0.02% of 5 million. It is just a random opinion.
While it is a long time since a National government could pretend to be governing in the interests of “everyone”, never before have they been so blatant in screwing the scrum to benefit “their” team. As an increasing
number of New Zealanders come to recognise that they are not included in this team, feelings of disillusion and distrust will surely increase. Feelings of pride in the “Team of Five Million” as we faced down Covid are sadly a distant memory.