Shamabil Yacob

So to see that amongst our young people there is a sense of hope and that there is a sense of aspiration tells me that if we can keep working on this, if we can give them the tools, if we can shape the narrative, there will be future leaders who will come along and take the baton.

Look, for me, the big surprise on the negative side was just how much we eroded in such a short period of time.

I suspect it's because we've had this kind of relentless recession, cost of living crisis.

All of those things together have just made it feel really rough on people.

You know, that's just hard to kind of get on.

I hope that some of these will ease once these economic pressures also ease.

But that kind of hardening of attitudes towards immigration, immigrants, particular people in particular, and the rise of racism, those concern me a lot.

I think those are attitudes that shift fast on the negative side but are hard to reverse.

Well, first, there is still hope.

I don't think we're in a position where New Zealand is such a divided country that we have no options, no choices.

That's absolutely not true.

We are, for the vast majority, still good people, generally holding strong values.

We still have lots of common areas of interest.

Even if we don't know, I think that's partly the issue is we hold similar values, but we don't know and we can't see it.

But also, I think what I'm seeing is a lot of focus when it comes to things like social cohesion or big problems.

And we go to what will the government do or what's the big central one of policy solution that will fix this.

And the more I engage with this research, the more I realize that it's not just what you do.

It's also how you do it.

And I think the way we do things has to be a little bit different.

It has to be a little bit more grounded in community.