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The dust has settled on another Waitangi Day dominated by the pointless, oxygen-sucking, short-term sideshows like David Seymour and his soon to be binned Treaty Principles Bill.
And once again, one of the real and genuinely fast-growing threats to Māori and their place in New Zealand has been ignored.
We resolved nothing; see you next year. The 2025 Waitangi debate about Māori-crown relations – about two peoples living together in a modern nation – was boring, banal and went nowhere we haven’t been for months, if not years.
I believe it’s irrelevant and misses the point. This is because I think we’re all ignoring a genuine issue: the rapid growth in our population, fuelled by continued high levels of immigration.
Despite record departures in the past year, we still gained population through migrant arrivals. We are still seen as an attractive country – and given all the current trouble in the world, are likely to be so for some time to come. We put up relatively few barriers and ask few questions, and because of this, lack detailed understanding of who’s come to live here and what their skills and intentions are.
In 2023, we welcomed about 240,000 migrants. When departures were counted our net gain was still 120,000. In the year ended September, the net gain was 30,600.
Is New Zealand going to be a place where immigrants put down roots or merely a stop on the way to Australia? How do we accommodate people whether they’re staying here temporarily or settling permanently? What about the infrastructure needed to support this? At my son’s primary schools we had kids from 50 countries in the playground speaking their own language and bringing their own customs. That doesn’t come without challenges for the schooling system, for teachers and for the scarce resources on offer.
In many ways, these new New Zealanders are brave by leaving familiar homelands, often parents and other family, for a fresh shot at life. They’re here for a better life, to bring up families, perhaps to enjoy better educational opportunities, to save to buy houses and set up businesses. They’re hard-working, law-abiding citizens who will often work in jobs and do hours that many others won’t. So I think we can learn from them – their hunger, their drive, their willingness to save and forge a better life is to be commended.
My concerns are not about where people come from but the impact of a rapidly changing demographic on Māori identity, especially when Māori are at risk of being outnumbered by other ethnic groups.
Do Māori agree with mass immigration policies? Te Pāti Māori told me many years back immigration should be capped at 20,000 a year, but that would leave employers desperate and the economy struggling.
Just 6% of all land in New Zealand – about 1.5 million hectares – is now classified as Māori land (in communal ownership), compared with about 80% in 1860. But having control of a proportion of land and resources becomes more difficult if you’re no longer the second-largest ethnic group in the country.
Prime Minister Christopher Luxon has raised the idea of asset sales. How does Māoridom feel about this? As an aside, the four biggest private landowners in New Zealand are all foreign-owned forestry companies. Why don’t New Zealanders, Māori included, own the biggest forests?
The effects of increased immigration on home ownership, rental costs, education, health, transport and democracy are massive. We haven’t even got to grips with being a bicultural nation, let alone a multicultural one where in Auckland, for example, more than 100 nationalities live.
For Māori, the implications may be even greater, as they sit at the bottom of many socio-economic statistics. It’s much harder to achieve without a solid financial, social and economic base and suddenly things are even more competitive, with more people in the scramble for resources.
Building our population through immigration has been a deliberate policy for 30 years by successive governments who believed we simply don’t have enough people or diversity of skills and experience. Adopting a stance of economic growth through immigration highlights the absence of a true economic growth pathway.
The ensuing economic and social change to the status of Māori is far too easily ignored by every iwi leader, the narrowly focused Te Pati Māori co-leaders, the 15 well-meaning but awfully misguided Greens, and the tiki-clutching leader of the Labour Party, Chris Hipkins, who is loathe to offend anyone so saying not much at all.
Only New Zealand First’s Shane Jones is talking about this. In the lead up to Waitangi 2024 he said, “I look at where New Zealand is today, and the multi-ethnic, multi-dimensional aspect, and I’m horrified by the prospect that by 2040 there could be 7 million of us in New Zealand, so if iwi are concerned about what they sense as marginalisation, how come no iwi leader is standing with me and challenging the mass immigration coming into New Zealand?
“Not one single iwi leader. But no, they carry on about these esoteric things to do with a new Parliament or treaty principles and another 100,000 come into New Zealand. To me, that’s more of a threat to our coherence and to the foundation influences that have built. I’m a voice in the wilderness, no iwi would ever stand with me on this issue.”
Jones continues to stand by his concerns and to voice them, but the silence of iwi leaders is deafening. I can’t recall any of our pre-eminent Māori leaders saying anything or voicing their concerns, perhaps because they’re focussed on opposing David Seymour and running their own iwi affairs.
But does that mean they’re looking the wrong way and missing the main game?
