Chapter 1: What does the 'butter chicken tsunami' metaphor mean for New Zealand?
I don't care how much criticism we get. I'm just never going to agree with a sort of butter chicken tsunami coming to New Zealand. Clearly racist.
It's frustrating because, of course, I look the way that I look. So he means it's people like Shamabil that he doesn't want in this country.
Shamabil Yacob had just finalised his report on social cohesion in New Zealand when Minister Shane Jones unleashed on immigrants. But surprisingly, Bangladesh-born, Lincoln-raised Shamabil wasn't surprised. His report found Kiwi attitudes toward immigrants are hardening, with 36% saying immigration levels are too high.
Absolutely. Our views on immigration are hardening very fast. It is really quite frightening because New Zealand, of course, is built on many generations of immigration.
Hi, I'm Amanda Gillies, and today on The Detail, the social state of our country. Are we a happy, inclusive and trusting population of 5 million, or is the social glue that binds us together fast becoming unstark?
New Zealand is fractured. We have three very different New Zealanders living alongside each other. And I see these divisions across financial stress.
The pain at the pump is now driving up the cost of food, freight and farming, which ultimately lands with consumers.
Politics, distrust in institutions.
A new poll shows Kiwis are losing faith in nationals' economic credibility, with confidence in its ability to handle the cost of living crisis plummeting.
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Chapter 2: How are Kiwis' attitudes towards immigration changing?
The report released today was commissioned by the Helen Clark Foundation and co-authored by Shamabeel, Chief Economist at Simplicity. Nearly 3,000 Kiwis of all ages and backgrounds took part in the survey late last year and were asked the same questions as the previous year, which was the first year of the survey. The latest results billed as both
hopeful and frightening in equal measure, show social cohesion has slipped across all dimensions.
One thing that frightened the hell out of me was just how distrusting of institutions and government we have become over time. We can see why that is, that it feels like we don't have the leadership across successive governments to really deal with the big, knotty problems. But also there are some very personal things that frighten me.
The rise in loneliness is extraordinary, particularly amongst young people. That really concerns me, surprises me, saddens me, because when people are isolated and disconnected, it becomes a self-reinforcing problem. So that's the kind of the disappointing ends of things. On the positive end was just how strongly held the idea of New Zealanders.
There is this extraordinary passion for New Zealand, and it sits across age, ethnicity, location, New Zealand-born, foreign-born. It doesn't matter. We love this country. And to me, that gives me a really positive foundation to build from. And not just a little bit, right? It's a very strong foundation.
The other thing that gives me a lot of hope is just how much aspiration there is in our young people. Because I hear all the time, oh, young people, they're feckless. Not true. If anybody's feckless, it's the middle-aged and the old. We are complacent. We are happy to have gotten all the good stuff. And now we don't want to work on it.
Whereas the young people, they're not experiencing the best conditions, but they have so much optimism and hope for the future.
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Chapter 3: What does the latest report reveal about social cohesion in New Zealand?
To me, that's the foundation for growth. That's the foundation for change. So I feel like there is lots of stuff about New Zealand that's actually really good, even if right now there are some signals that are quite frightening.
We're about six months out from the election and this week alone we've had calls for the Prime Minister, he's going to lose his job and stand down and he came out and said that is actually on the media, we've created this.
For the last week there has been intense media speculation about my leadership and about who said what to whom. The caucus has answered clearly and decisively, it has backed my leadership and that matter is now closed and I won't be commenting further on it.
Kiwis expect the media to ask us the tough questions about our policies, to hold us to account for our pledges to New Zealanders, and to interrogate us about the things that matter to them. They are not interested in this media psychopora.
Is that where some of the distrust in the government comes from? What are you putting this decrease in trust in the government down to?
Yeah, look, I think it's very easy to point the finger at media, but media amplifies the feelings in society. What we can see in the data is that the loss of trust in government has been taking place pretty much since COVID days. So there was actually a small period of a pop in trust in government in the early days of COVID. Since then, it's been trending down.
So I don't think it's necessarily about media per se, but I think it's much more to do with the fact that We had relatively easy options when it came to government in the past. We had enough money to pay for the things that we wanted. We didn't have those pressing problems of aging, of government borrowing, of climate change on us in the way they're at the moment.
What we're finding is our system of government is currently just not up to task to deal with those big changes because politics is, at its core, oppositional. It's confrontational. And yet the kinds of changes we need require broad consensus or a broad base of agreement.
So we've kind of got this system of government that I think is counterproductive to the kinds of changes that New Zealanders want. And I feel like that's why New Zealanders are so turned off by politics at the moment, but also because we've become ideological. So we can't see the merit in somebody else's solutions.
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Chapter 4: Why is trust in government declining among New Zealanders?
Oh, I don't know.
Father Chicken Tsunami is racist.
It doesn't sound right. I mean, I'm just saying to you it's alarmist and it's actually unhelpful language.
What was your take?
Oh, clearly racist. I mean, there is absolutely no other way of doing it. And it's frustrating because, of course, I look the way that I look. So he means it's people like Shamabil that he doesn't want in this country.
That's tough.
Well, it is. And I think as an immigrant, you're always in the position, particularly when you look different from other people. You know, it's like me and my kids are not going to blend in like some other people will. And so there is an element of not just what it means for me, but what it means for future generations.
If you think about places like Auckland, where the majority of children who are born here are now Asian. So what are we saying about our politics? And what does it say to the future generation of New Zealanders that are coming?
Personal question for you then. Have you noticed you personally or to you or your family an increase in maybe that sort of attitude of late?
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Chapter 5: How does financial stress impact social cohesion?
It doesn't mean they need to be exactly like us, but for them to be able to navigate to New Zealand society. Our immigration policy essentially is, do you qualify to come here? If yes, great. After that, well, good luck. You're on your own, right? In Canada, even there they have had a turn in immigration policy and attitudes towards immigration. But until recently, it had been pretty positive.
And what they had was locally set quotas for how many people would come, but also local decision making of how do we create the environment for new immigrants to become part of the community, to learn about our culture, to learn about our language, to learn about how we do things, and a two-way process.
And I think that meant that resistance to immigration only really picked up post-COVID when it just went up too fast.
What about financially? Where are we at as a country? How are we feeling? Are we stressed? OK, where are we at?
We're feeling pretty stressed financially. And that matters because, one, the impact of the recession and the cost of living crisis has really hurt a lot of people. It's a big chunk of New Zealanders now. But two, we know that when people are living in financial discomfort and financial stress, that has a real bearing on social cohesion.
And what I mean by that is it both kind of creates tunnel vision and you're unable to have hope and positive things about the future, but also because it reduces participation, participation in sport, in social activities with each other and all those other bits and pieces. And it becomes this kind of very isolating, horrible situation.
So when we looked through our data, what we found was the biggest predictor of low social cohesion was poverty.
You mentioned isolation. It all just goes hand in hand, doesn't it? And you can't afford to get out and then we're just becoming as a society so much more isolated and lonely.
We are. I was talking to somebody the other day, and he was saying, the question I ask is, do you know your neighbor's five doors down? And I thought that was a really good question.
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Chapter 6: What role does loneliness play in New Zealand's social fabric?
So the gap remains. But I think the wider story for us last year was that we needed a benchmark to ask ourselves, how do we stand? And that comparison with Australia was useful because it helped us understand what the numbers meant. This year, we know that we're still behind them. But what we are also interested in is the change that we've seen over the last 12 months.
There was probably more change than I expected. I didn't expect in 12 months I'd see the erosion that we saw. But also same with Australia. I didn't expect the massive opposition to immigration that's come through in the data. Of course, we've seen the headlines in terms of the protests and things like that, but it's now much wider in society than had been 12 months ago.
So something is changing, and I think it has a couple of lessons for us. One is that these kinds of negative attitudes can become quite big quite quick. But two, it's not enough to just rely on what you have. You actually have to work on it actively if you want to improve it. And I think New Zealand is probably a little bit further on in that path
in that urgency to deal with those social cohesion problems. Australia probably has just a little bit more time. They have a little bit more of that social community connections that we don't have. They're far more religious than we are. They are much more likely to go to sporting events and sporting clubs and social clubs than we are. They're more likely to do all of those things.
And so they seem to have this layer of social infrastructure that's still holding together better than ours. In our data, for example, I was really surprised that one of the strongest predictors of good social cohesion, both aspiration and experience, was being religious.
Really? Because that was one of my questions, is how do we turn this around?
Well, it's very hard to say to people that you should become more religious, right? It sounds a bit moralising. But at the same time, I think it's more the types of people and the activities that they take. You know, you're mixing with a cross-section of New Zealand. You are mixing with people but with a shared purpose. There are ways to work together across difference.
There is leadership that's in the community and visible and almost tangible here. So religiosity is not the only thing. It's also those people who are going to sporting clubs, also going to the local knitting club, whatever.
It's that ability to come together and holding complexity together, holding difference together and still being able to have a conversation, even if we do differ a little bit on politics or how we look or what, it doesn't matter. But that's the, I think to me, it's not religion per se, but it's that bit of being able to come together despite our differences. In fact, because of our differences.
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Chapter 7: What insights do young people provide about the future of New Zealand?
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.
And looking at both reports, I mean, what have we actually learned? What have we learned about our strengths and our weaknesses when it comes to this sort of social cohesion in New Zealand today?
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. It has to involve people a lot more. Because that loss of trust in institutions means that it's the wrong question to ask.
We can't say that on the one hand, I don't trust government. And on the other, what is government going to do to fix this? It just doesn't add up, right? So I think that's where we're getting a little bit stuck. So some of it is about earning back the trust, starting from our local communities. It's not quite clear to me yet what that looks like.
But what I do know is that it's kind of the right combination of activities that happens in our small communities. So for example... If I'm a central government and I'm commissioning a project in, I don't know, Belcluther, it shouldn't be just that one-off project that funds that project for the 12 months.
We also need to think about how do we create a community infrastructure so whatever you're starting there is actually going to be enduring. So the question has to be a little bit broader than this one-off thing that quite often we do in policy circles, something a little bit bigger. But there's also an element of we can't think about social cohesion as something that sits on the other side.
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Chapter 8: What actions can be taken to improve social cohesion in New Zealand?
This episode was produced by Gwen McClure and engineered by Jeremy Ansell. I'm Amanda Gillies. Mā te wā.