KEY POINTS:
A decade of rising prosperity has failed to close the income gaps between Maori and Pacific families and European families with children, new research shows.
An Auckland University research group led by the Prime Minister's husband, Professor Peter Davis, has found that the real incomes of Maori and Pacific couples with children, as a proportion of real European incomes, have declined since 1996.
Rising prosperity lifted the real incomes of two-parent European families by 23.1 per cent between the 1996 and 2006 censuses, while the real incomes of Maori families rose by only 21.3 per cent and Pacific families by only 18.9 per cent.
Ethnic gaps have also widened for home ownership and overcrowding.
But the proportions of Maori and Pacific families on very low incomes, under half of the national median, have dropped, while the proportion of European families on very low incomes rose a little, so on that score the gap has closed.
The research, presented at a sociology conference in Auckland yesterday by a member of Professor Davis's research team, Andrew Sporle, has adjusted Census income figures for both inflation and the ages and numbers of people in each family, producing figures for "equivalised" families with average numbers of children and adults. Earlier data from the same research programme showed the overall equivalised real median income of all families dropped from $37,463 in 1981 to a low of $33,227 in 1991, and was still only $37,665 in 2001 - virtually unchanged from 20 years earlier.
The new data shows that equivalised two-income families with children have made real gains in the subsequent five years to 2006, boosting real incomes by 9.9 per cent for families with at least one Pacific parent, 10 per cent for families with at least one Maori parent, and 9.8 per cent for families with no Maori or Pacific parents.
But the marginally bigger gains for Maori and Pacific families in this latest period have not been enough to offset relative declines in the previous five years, when Maori and Pacific incomes grew more slowly than in other families.
Maori and Pacific families also closed the real income gap during the decade to 1991, when their incomes fell by less in real terms than those of European families, and in the first half of the 1990s when Maori and Pacific families recovered from recession more strongly than Europeans.
Over the whole 25-year period from 1981 to 2006, real equivalised Pacific incomes rose by 32 per cent, Maori incomes by 29 per cent and other families by only 17 per cent.
For sole-parent families with children, the gaps have closed even more strongly over the quarter-century, with a huge 54 per cent rise in real equivalised incomes for Pacific people, and a healthy 27 per cent increase for Maori, contrasting with a tiny increase of just 5 per cent for other sole-parent families. Sole-parent incomes are more dependent on welfare benefits, which were cut in 1991.
Maori and Pacific sole-parent families may have suffered relatively less over the long term because of declining birth rates, which may have increased their equivalised incomes after the figures were adjusted for the number of people in each family.
However, home ownership levels for all groups have worsened since 1991.
Overcrowding declined up to 2001 but has increased in the past five years, especially for Maori and Pacific families. Professor Davis suggested that this might be partly due to a recent upward blip in the birth rate. But Mr Sporle said the main cause was escalating housing costs.
