ANALYSIS:
When the Black Ferns won the Rugby World Cup in thrilling fashion, they achieved something rare and precious.
New Zealanders were united - even if just for an evening - at a time of growing social division. Those who may not have previously subscribed to rugby’s dominant place in our national identity felt included for the first time.
It was our national sport, but not as we knew it. A diverse group of women played helter-skelter rugby with smiles on their faces in front of families and children twirling their poi in Eden Park’s stands. Samoan-Pākehā star Ruby Tui led supporters in a waiata, and they sang in return.
It was all the more remarkable because unifying moments in New Zealand’s recent history have tended to follow a crisis. The initial response to Covid-19 in early 2020 brought New Zealanders together in a way rarely seen outside wartime.
In the immediate period after the mosque attacks in 2019, New Zealanders rallied behind the shell-shocked Muslim community and refused to allow a hateful terror attack to divide society.
Concern over growing social unease has prompted a high-level push to measure and encourage social cohesion in this country.
New Zealand has been through periods of polarisation before. Experts draw comparisons to the Springbok Tour and economic turmoil in the 1980s.
This time, however, it is different. The social divisions opening up in this country are numerous and complicated, and are developing more rapidly than ever before.
New Zealanders’ trust in institutions and each other is being tested.
Politics has become more polarised and emotive, encouraged by a relatively ungoverned online world which has provided opportunities for spreading disinformation and misinformation.
Old fault lines in the country’s Māori-Pākehā foundations are re-emerging again over the promotion of Māori language and governance rights.
There is no end in sight to the housing crisis or for households who are in the deepest poverty.
On top of that local backdrop are existential, global pressures like climate change, ecological degradation, and rapidly emerging technologies.
Social cohesion is not simply a buzzword or a feel-good, aspirational goal, experts say. Failing to address divisions could eventually threaten democracy itself and fracture society in a way which undermines our very identity.
In the next step of The New New Zealand: Rebuilding Better, a series exploring the big issues we face, the Herald takes a look at what is driving division in this country and how we might start to heal.
So how did we get here?
Some point to the Global Financial Crisis between 2008-12 as a pivotal period. It was the beginning of a housing crisis which continues to this day, a decline in living standards, and led to labour “scarring” - lifelong impacts for people who lost their jobs.
There are other slow-burning factors that have been simmering away in the background. Sociologist Paul Spoonley, who specialises in social change, says there has been anxiety about New Zealand’s fast-changing demography and ethnic makeup in the past two decades. Auckland is now one of the most diverse cities in the world.
Spoonley pinpoints two further issues in the past decade which have contributed to social cohesion “unravelling”.
The first is the post-2016 online world and the emergence of “anti-diversity politics”, especially from sources like the conspiracy group QAnon, which have started to gain a foothold in New Zealand.
The second issue is the anxieties and challenges of the Covid-19 pandemic.
“Certainly by late last year, early this year, what you notice is the trust in experts, trust in Government, trust in the media really take a big dive,” Spoonley says.
Other factors have been piling up on top of each other. Experts also highlight the cost-of-living crisis, a real or imagined rural-urban divide and a feeling that crime is out of control, along with the ongoing grappling - sometimes coloured by bigotry - with the role of Te Tiriti o Waitangi in informing our politics, institutions and lives.
In December, a group of researchers at the University of Auckland said global politics were increasingly shaped by emotion and fuelled by polarising media, technology and misinformation.
“The emotions of anger, fear, and hatred of others have emerged in the public square, most obviously in the USA, but New Zealand may be heading in that direction, arguably accelerated by some responses to actions taken to address the Covid-19 pandemic,” the researchers said in a report by the research institute Koi Tū.
The researchers said a major challenge to social cohesion was the emergence of the relatively unregulated online world.
“The arrival of powerful and effective ways of transmitting ad hominem attacks has undermined the traditional institutions on which all societies rely to sustain co-operation and respect.”
It is not the first time New Zealanders have felt deeply divided. Asked for comparable points in history, academics cited the Waterfront Dispute in 1951 and the Springbok Tour in 1981.
In 1951, the country’s wharves ground to a halt as up to 22,000 union members walked off the job in a bitter dispute which lasted five months. It led to a state of emergency and the military stepping in to unload ships.
In 1981, the apartheid-era tour of the all-white South African rugby team in New Zealand prompted up to 150,000 New Zealanders to protest in the streets and at test matches, and forced a spotlight back on Māori-Pākehā relations and the impact of colonisation in this country.
“I’ve never seen the country so close to civil war,” former Green MP and lifelong activist Sue Bradford told the Herald.
“Families were split. Workplaces were split, brothers and sisters, it was just awful. There was fighting in the streets, people were injured and thousands of us locked up and all the rest of it.”
The tour was followed by economic turmoil. Unemployment rates soared, and then New Zealand’s working class were dispossessed when the Labour-led Government deregulated the financial system, leading to mass layoffs of factory workers.
“It was just dreadful for people,” Bradford says. “Some people were made redundant and never got jobs back in their whole lives. I still see people that are casualties of that.”
Historians later wrote that the tour protests were a response to the “trauma of major change” being witnessed in the 1980s.
Forty years on, the collective trauma of the Covid pandemic prompted up to 1000 protestors to occupy Parliament grounds in Wellington for three weeks in opposition to Covid-19 vaccines and mandates. It was the most visible, shocking display of some of the divisions that had risen out of the pandemic.
The difference between the skirmishes of the 1980s and today’s divisions, one academic says, is that in the past New Zealanders still had some common ground.
Kate Hannah, director of independent research group The Disinformation Project, describes it as a “shared reality”.
“What we have now is increasingly not a shared reality,” Hannah says.
“The common ground is more difficult to locate.”
The importance of social cohesion gained new momentum in New Zealand after the Christchurch mosque attacks in 2019.
The Royal Commission of Inquiry into the terror attack highlighted the importance of cohesion not only to counter extremism but for political stability and long-term prosperity.
A socially cohesive society was one in which all individuals and groups had a sense of belonging, inclusion, participation, recognition and legitimacy, the commission stated. It also recommended measuring and reporting on social cohesion in this country.
A baseline report by the Ministry of Social Development, published in October, found that New Zealand scored relatively highly when it came to a sense of belonging, wellbeing, trust in others and in government. But the findings were uneven. Māori were less likely to trust in other people and institutions (especially police and the health sector) and recent migrants experienced higher rates of loneliness.
“There is a whole chunk of society for whom society works,” says Anjum Rahman, a Muslim community leader and founder of advocacy group Inclusive Aotearoa. In 2020, the collective she founded toured the country to hold hui in which groups of people spoke about their lives, their sense of belonging or alienation, and what they felt needed to change in this country.
“We visited 46 towns and cities and we came across a lot of people who said I have no issues, everything works for me, school is great, I have my job, my family.”
This group might not see or understand what it’s like to be discriminated against when applying for a job or a place to live, or to have faced the same struggle to find work, affordable or accessible housing or access to justice. For these people, change is seen as a threat, Rahman says.
So in trying to make society more cohesive, how do you take these people with you?
Labour MP Priyanca Radhakrishnan, the Government minister tasked with encouraging social cohesion, says “it’s about looking at what the benefits are for us collectively … and what sort of society we want to be a part of”.
“And the flipside of that - a society that is polarised around specific groups, whether it’s religious difference or ethnic differences or socioeconomic status. All of that is detrimental to us as a whole.”
She refers to New Zealand’s collective response to the mosque attacks.
“If you look at the aftermath, there were outpourings of aroha and support from people who might have lived on the street for 30 years and not realised there was a mosque there. So I think the argument there to take everyone along with us is: What kind of society do we want to be? And then work backwards.”
So far, the Government has announced a high-level strategy to encourage social cohesion, has begun measuring and reporting on it, and has funded community initiatives.
While the Government is facilitating the process, social cohesion will be a collective effort including workplaces, community groups and individuals, the minister says.
The state can only do so much, she adds; it does not want to be accused of social engineering.
Because there are multiple causes of social division, there is no simple cure. Experts believe it will require tackling the weighty, generational issues like inequality and growing distrust in institutions.
It could require radical reform of Parliament to make it more inclusive and transparent and give people some agency over changes in society.
And the way we engage and debate - in media, online and in Parliament - will need to change dramatically.
One of the most important things New Zealanders can do is to keep reinforcing social norms whenever possible, Kate Hannah says.
She gives the example of a news organisation carefully moderating its online comments.
“One of the things that I’m really encouraging people to do is actually draw lines. A lot of people are playing in what we call the grey zone, which is the zone prior to something being illegal.
“But we can tell them that it’s unacceptable, even if it’s not illegal, and we can draw lines in the sand and say, actually, for us, as a community, when you step over this line, we find that not acceptable. It’s called social norm reinforcement. And it’s a really key part of social cohesion.”
Reinforcing social norms can prove difficult when people “go down the rabbit-hole”.
“But our two degrees of separation in New Zealand is probably going to be the thing that I hope will save us,” Hannah says.
“So while people have got fully-formed alternative media, alternative news sources, alternative information sources, they are still connected to family and whānau and communities that are grounded in reality, like rugby clubs and kura and the beach. And so we have that opportunity that I don’t think perhaps other countries have.”
Rahman believes social cohesion has to be led by workplaces and communities. The most valuable approach to social division is human connection, which government cannot provide in the same way communities can, she says.
In her organisation’s nationwide hui in 2020, people from diverse backgrounds gathered together in person and on Zoom to talk about belonging in New Zealand.
“It really opened my eyes to how little I knew about so many people’s lives. So to me, that’s a stream of human connection. And it’s offline.
“Being in the room and having those conversations and just taking the time and space to listen and hear each other’s experiences tends to be really powerful. So it’s also about how do we create those spaces in terms of people that are going down those sorts of QAnon and really out-there spaces?
“Again, what we’re seeing is the human connection - it is the whānau that don’t let go, that keep the connection, who keep talking, and keep letting that person know they’re valued and loved. That has been more successful. And obviously it’s intensive and it takes time. But it does tend to work.”
It does not mean everyone has to hold hands and refrain from criticism, she adds.
“We don’t even have to like each other. We certainly don’t have to agree with each other about basic fundamental things. But we do have to have the basis of value and respect.”
The dizzying rate of change is a key factor in causing social unease.
“Remember, people do not like rapid change, they like slow change,” says Sir Peter Gluckman, one of New Zealand’s most high-profile scientists and a co-author of the Koi Tu report on social cohesion.
“And we’re in a phase of very rapid change and scary change, geostrategic instability, growing inequalities, and intergenerational concerns.
“All of these things compound to make people feel very anxious. And when people are anxious, they get scared. And when they’re scared, they lose trust in the system.”
His report highlighted how governments were rushing through major reforms, traditional media were skimming over big issues without analysis, and social media had encouraged bite-sized entertainment.
Gluckman says the solution could be to give people more agency, possibly by making New Zealand’s democratic system more inclusive and “deliberative”.
At the moment, the public’s main way of having a say on Parliamentary matters was through select committees. But Sir Peter describes the committees as “a bloody disaster” because they are too partisan, narrowly focused and are not well-equipped to deal with longer-term social or constitutional issues.
He would like New Zealand to consider something similar to Ireland’s citizens’ assemblies. Introduced in 2016, the assemblies of 100 randomly-selected, representative members of the public were used to comprehensively consider political questions, including abortion, climate change and Parliamentary terms, and guide government on any necessary reform.
“They are complex issues that are values-laden, and should not be caught up in the short-termism of political cycles,” Gluckman says.
There is a “superficial unwillingness” among politicians, media and society to have honest and complex conversations in New Zealand, he says.
This is partly because of the New Zealand psyche, said Kate Hannah, the director of the Disinformation Project. We can be allergic to uncomfortable, confrontational debate. But this is exactly what is necessary.
“It’s important that we can understand that the things that make us feel more socially connected feel a bit new and awkward at first - just like when we first heard the Te Reo anthem at Twickenham.”
Which brings us back to the Black Ferns and the World Cup.
“They showed us how we can still have the old things and they can change and be different,” Hannah said.
“And that it’s actually better when we change them and have them be a little bit different. It’s a really true example of how change isn’t scary.”
This country nearly tore itself apart over a few rugby games in 1981. In 2022, a rugby team gave a glimpse of how our wounds might heal.
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