KEY POINTS:
Bernie O'Donnell surveys the bustling radio office he shares with personalities such as Titewhai Harawira and Willie Jackson.
Administration staff mix easily with the presenters and newshounds who ensure South Auckland's Radio Waatea makes it to the air. And it is O'Donnell, of Te Atiawa and Ngati Mutunga descent, who ensures the show does go on - controlling around 30 staff.
It's a far cry from the meatworks chain that greeted the now 44-year-old father of four when he left Otara's Tangaroa College with no formal qualifications at 15.
"I remember leaving school and looking in the situations vacant page and sometimes there just weren't any jobs," he says.
Adopted by a Polish and Irish couple, he moved to Taranaki in the 1980s to look for his birth family. He worked as a rubbish collector and then forklift driver, then enrolled in a Maori language course at Taranaki Polytechnic. He found a new world of cultural pride.
"I saw a group of young Maori men being very, very Maori, speaking the reo, being strong in their taha Maori and being very, very together. And I knew then that that was what I wanted."
New data from the 2006 census suggests that O'Donnell's experience may typify his generation, and that, at long last, we may be "closing the gaps" between European New Zealanders and those of Maori and Pacific descent.
In the five years since the 2001 census, the median Maori income leapt by 41 per cent from $14,800 to $20,900, whereas the New Zealand median rose by only 31 per cent, to $24,400.
And the proportion of Maori in paid work rose from 56 per cent to almost 62 per cent - now just 1 per cent behind the national average.
Census details for Pacific Islanders and other groups are not yet available. But the Maori figures and other statistics now show that the country's near-consistent economic growth since 1993 has lifted many of the most marginalised into employment, with all the benefits that brings.
"A shift has been obvious and I think that's exciting," says Dr Colleen McMurchy-Pilkington, of Te Puna Wananga, in the University of Auckland's education faculty.
But she adds: "We have to be careful we don't get too excited. We have a long way to go before we get to where I suspect a lot of Maori want to be."
The original goal of Helen Clark's newly elected Government in November 1999, as stated by the Cabinet in February 2000, was to "close the gaps for Maori and Pacific people in health, education, employment and housing".
A political backlash saw a quick retreat into what became "Reducing Inequalities". Even this has dropped from sight since former National leader Don Brash's first Orewa speech in January 2004.
Social Development Ministry spokeswoman Bronwyn Saunders says the last report on specific initiatives was in June 2004. Since then, monitoring has been left to the census and the ministry's annual Social Report.
The evidence is mixed. Gains in education, work and income have not so far made much of a dent in areas such as health and crime.
It may be just a matter of time. Or it may be that what we are seeing is merely the cyclical spinoff from temporary prosperity, and that we have still not tackled some of the underlying causes of structural inequality.
Work and income
"Closing the gaps" was a response to a massive widening of inequalities after the last Labour Government elected in 1984 dismantled many of the controls that had kept the free market in check.
Some at the top did spectacularly well. The latest census counted 105,500 people, including 4100 Maori, earning more than $100,000 a year. Conversely, the lower end of society was devastated. Job numbers shrank by 116,000, or 7 per cent, in the five years to March 1992 and the median income fell by 12 per cent in real terms.
Maori, who did much of the work in manufacturing and state agencies such as the Forest Service and the Railways, were hit hardest. The proportion of Maori aged 15 to 64 in paid work plunged by a quarter, from 61.2 per cent to 46 per cent, and the median Maori income also collapsed by 25 per cent in real terms.
But the turnaround actually began well before the words "closing the gaps" were heard. As soon as the economy turned up in 1993, those at the bottom began to do better.
The number of working-aged Maori in paid work recovered from 46 per cent in 1992 to 53 per cent by 1996 and 64 per cent (80 per cent of the national average) in 2005.
The median Maori income rose from 78 per cent of the national median in 1991 to 82 per cent in 1996, slipped back slightly to 80 per cent in 2001 and rebounded to 86 per cent in the latest census.
On both measures, Maori have still not fully recovered from the free-market reforms. Back in 1986, their employment rate was 83 per cent of the national average and their median income was 90 per cent of the average. Some Maori who lost their jobs in the late 1980s have evidently never found consistent work again.
The picture looks slightly better on the census measure of employment, which counts the working-aged population as everyone aged 15 and over. The latest census puts Maori employment at 61.7 per cent, just behind the national average of 62.8 per cent. But this measure is distorted by the relative youth of Maori, with few retired people.
The census figures for unemployment - still 11 per cent of the Maori workforce against a national average of 5.1 per cent - reveals the extent to which the reforms have created a permanently jobless Maori underclass.
The census also shows that 28 per cent of Maori aged 15 and over are still receiving one of the four main welfare benefits, compared with a national average of 10.5 per cent.
Education and culture
Kel Sanderson, of the Berl economic consultancy, believes the gains in Maori employment and incomes are not purely cyclical. He says better education - and particularly the phenomenon of Te Wananga o Aotearoa - is lifting people into work.
Maori are advancing at all levels. Ninety per cent of Maori school entrants have now been to preschool; the proportion of Maori aged 15-plus with at least a level 1 high school qualification has risen from 39 per cent to 54 per cent in the past decade; and those with post-school qualifications are up from 18 per cent to 25 per cent.
Judith Nowotarski, a Maori member of the primary teachers' union executive and head teacher of the Hawera Kindergarten, says centres like hers have made a huge effort to involve the children's families.
"We have shared kai [food]. That's a place where I have seen especially Maori families thinking, 'I can contribute, because that's how I feel it should happen'," she says. "We also have pictures of people at our local marae.
"The children recognise those people and so do the families. They come in and say, 'I recognise that place'."
Garrick Cooper, a Maori researcher at the New Zealand Council for Educational Research, says the growth of Maori-language preschools, schools and tertiary institutions in the past 20 years has given young Maori "a solid identity - a solid platform as Maori to participate in the wider world".
Sixteen per cent of all Maori primary and secondary students were taught in te reo Maori in 2005. Just over half of Year 11 Maori-medium students gained NCEA qualifications in 2004, compared with 40 per cent of Maori in mainstream schooling (and 66 per cent of non-Maori).
Most dramatically, Te Wananga o Aotearoa grew explosively from 1000 students in 1999 to become the largest tertiary institution with 63,387 students in 2003, drawing in thousands of older Maori with free courses in Maori language and culture.
Sanderson says those courses had the effect of "getting them back into education and also giving them some sort of confidence about work". He estimates that the wananga has brought "maybe 30,000 to 50,000 people" into employment, adding $200 million a year to the national (and Maori) income.
Health
It is much harder so far to see much evidence of closing the gaps in health. Maori men and women continue to die eight and nine years earlier than non-Maori men and women respectively, just as they did a decade ago.
Maori are still twice as likely as non-Maori to be smokers. And the gap between Maori and non-Maori obesity has narrowed only because the problem has worsened among non-Maori, while the higher level of Maori obesity has barely changed.
Historically, health is clearly related to economic conditions. Through the era of postwar full employment, the life expectancy of Maori men rose steadily from only 54 years in 1950-52 to 65 years (95 per cent of Europeans) by 1985-87. But in the subsequent five years of unemployment, Maori life expectancy stalled while Europeans continued to live longer, so the Maori lifespan dropped back to 89 per cent of the European average.
Dr Rhys Jones, of the University of Auckland's Tomaiora Maori Health Research Group, says there is a long time-lag between improved economic conditions and better health.
"You are looking at a life course and even multiple generational influences on your health, so if you have accumulated disadvantage over the course of your life, that is likely to affect your health adversely," he says.
He points to a study last year showing that gaps between Maori and European health could be almost completely explained statistically by gaps in socio-economic status (now starting to close) and by the stress caused by people's experiences of racial discrimination in work, housing and personal interactions. That discrimination might take longer to eliminate.
Housing
Maori were badly hit by the move to market rents for state houses in the 1990s, with the proportion of Maori households paying more than 30 per cent of their incomes in rent jumping from 8 per cent in 1987-88 to 31 per cent a decade later.
Restoration of income-related rents has brought this back down to 21 per cent, virtually the same as for Europeans (19 per cent).
Crime
Like health, crime seems no better than ever. As total prison numbers have doubled over the past decade, Maori prisoners have doubled too. Maori men were 6.5 times as likely as European men to be in jail in 1996, and are still 6.8 times as likely to be there.
Prison Fellowship director Kim Workman, of Ngati Kahungunu descent, says prosperity has produced "a robust Maori middle class", but has left an alienated "brown proletariat" at the bottom.
He believes Maori families themselves could help close that gap. "A survey done five or six years ago found that a third of Maori prisoners don't have visits at all. They either don't have whanau or their whanau have abandoned them," he says.
"We have a whole resource of Maori men and women who could be going into the prisons, at no cost to the state, and running health courses or sports or kapa haka and helping [prisoners] to read and all those things.
"We need to move from promoting a Maori middle class to saying, 'Let's do that, but let's not widen the gap between the haves and the have-nots, and let's start putting some resources into the people at the very low end'."
The future
Hinerangi Edwards, 32, is part of that new middle class. Fluent in te reo, she runs a Wellington-based consultancy with her husband Kiwa Hammond. They live in Hawera, where they also run a weight-loss clinic and are partners in an investment company.
She is one of eight siblings, five of whom have postgraduate degrees. Their parents taught them that education was the key to success.
In South Auckland, O'Donnell also sees "a growing Maori middle class", but he says economic growth alone is not enough.
"There may be more jobs around now, but there are also more social problems, issues around violence. I knew mates who were in gangs back then. They are still in gangs. There are issues around domestic violence," he says.
He says the challenge for Maori is to "balance economic success with their taha Maori needs".
"My kids are strong in their taha Maori, and they are comfortable in a Pakeha world, which I wasn't. That is the absolute ideal. It is the next step," he says.
"Closing the gaps is not just about money. It is about being strong in your identity without being accused of being a sellout by Maori, or being attacked by Pakeha for the Maori values that you hold. That's the closing the gaps for me."
