Why New Zealand is struggling to achieve social cohesion

Chris Trotter

Social cohesion is one of those concepts that conceals more than it discloses.

It seems like an unqualified good at first inspection. What’s not to like about a society that coheres? But, upon further examination, all manner of dubious political and cultural agendas are revealed. Indeed, it is difficult to avoid the suspicion that the term itself was invented by a public relations agency to secure the acceptance of measures which, if described honestly, would be roundly rejected.

So, what was the Helen Clark Foundation (HCF) hoping to achieve by releasing a study entitled Social cohesion in New Zealand? While there is always merit in assembling reliable statistical and attitudinal data concerning the condition of New Zealand society (especially when the results are benchmarked against our nearest neighbour, Australia) the real challenge emerges only when the survey is complete.

What to do with the results?

On this score, the report’s authors, Shamubeel Eaqub and Rosie Collins, are frustratingly reticent. While there is exhaustive discussion of the results which – surprise, surprise – indicate that all is not well in New Zealand, solutions to the problems identified are conspicuous by their absence.

With the release of a survey indicating that roughly a third of New Zealanders support the idea of a “strong leader”, unfettered by Parliament, getting stuck in and fixing what’s broken in their country, it is surely not unreasonable for the public to expect a robust examination of how their democracy got into such trouble and what should be done to get it out.

The question acquired added urgency when, at around the same time as the HCF was releasing Social cohesion in New Zealand, New Zealanders learned that Te Pāti Māori was refusing to appear before Parliament’s Privileges Committee. Its recalcitrance constituted disturbing evidence that even in the body most responsible for keeping the interwoven threads of New Zealand society tight, social cohesion was unravelling.

That Te Pāti Māori was prepared to cock such a provocative snook at the ‘colonial’ House of Representatives comported impressively with Eaqub’s and Collins’ findings. Māori, Asian and Pasifika register significantly less trust and confidence in New Zealand’s political and administrative institutions than Pakeha. Māori are also the most enthusiastic supporters of putting a strong leader in charge.

Overall, Eaqub and Collins were surprised and disappointed to discover that New Zealanders’ confidence in their political system is appreciably less than that of Australians asked the same questions.

They should not have been surprised. What is social cohesion, after all, but a reflection of the material wellbeing, or lack of it, at any given moment, in any given country.

Australia is a much richer country than New Zealand and its people enjoy a much higher level of personal security than New Zealanders – thanks in no small measure to the runaway success of Australia’s compulsory superannuation scheme, which now boasts a fund in the trillions. Add to that solid financial foundation the fact that the Australian landmass contains a mind-numbingly large quantity of minerals in high global demand and the country’s levels of social cohesion are scarcely to be wondered at.

Too much cohesion?

A survey of New Zealand’s social history will throw up whole decades when New Zealanders felt remarkably relaxed about their material circumstances and cohered to a degree that alarmed the nation’s small clutch of cultural and political critics.

Writing in the mid-1960s, one of New Zealand’s leading poets, James K Baxter, wrote:

You feed your paupers concrete. They work well,

Ask for no second meal, vote, pay tribute

Of silence on Anzac Day in the pub urinal;

Expose death only by a mushroom smell.

It’s possible to have too much social cohesion.

Certainly, the defiance of Te Pāti Māori, reflecting as it does the growing frustration and anger of that part of New Zealand society which has, ever since Rogernomics, brought the steady equalisation of Pakeha and Māori living standards (which had been gathering pace throughout the 1960s and 70s) to a shuddering halt, finds itself represented at the top of almost all of New Zealand’s most dire social statistics.

What possible grounds could any social surveyor have for being surprised by New Zealand’s disintegrating social cohesion when upwards of a fifth of its people, all of them conveniently identifiable by the colour of their skin, are only intermittently employed, appallingly housed, structurally excluded from consistent and effective health and education services and constantly falling prey to the false promises of substance abuse and its inseparable partners crime and violence?

Their indigestible misery weighs heavy in the belly of the nation, requiring almost as much energy to ignore as it does to endure.

Ever since the privatisation and deregulation drive of the 1980s and 90s wiped out the prime sources of well-paid Māori employment in the extractive, processing and manufacturing sectors, creating socially corrosive levels of unemployment and poverty, the obvious political opening has been to the left. So daunting was the ideological challenge of a transformative left-turn, however, that both National and Labour made the electorally rational decision to encourage nationalism over socialism.

Both major parties committed themselves to the treaty settlement process, which meant elevating historical over contemporary grievances. Such economic assistance as was deemed justifiable was carefully channelled through a host of revitalised iwi structures, reconfigured to accommodate the corporate capitalist model mandated by the Crown.

A new tribal elite, supported by a growing Māori middle-class, drove forward a cultural renaissance powerful enough to co-opt and redirect the energies of young and talented Māori who might otherwise have led a system-threatening struggle for economic justice.

But, nationalism has a nasty habit of escaping the control of those who seek to harness it, unacknowledged, to their political ambitions.

Inevitable clash

Economic radicalism is readily universalised: poor people come in every colour, including white, but cultural radicalism, almost by definition, is not for everyone. With te Tiriti now presented as the unalterable charter for restoring Aotearoa and dismantling the colonial state, the defiance of the Privileges Committee by Te Pāti Māori, or some equally outrageous assault on Pakeha tradition, was inevitable.

The HCF’s amassing of data, its mapping of attitudinal shifts, is of little use when the nation’s social cohesion is being stress-tested by mutually antagonistic ethnic aspirations.

There is absolutely no electoral mileage in Te Pāti Māori behaving like good little Westminster parliamentarians. Not after Hana-Rawhiti Maipi-Clarke’s haka electrified tens of thousands of rangatahi Māori and millions more indigenous people around the world. Not after Eru Kapa-Kingi, son of Te Pāti Māori MP Mariameno Kapa-Kīngi, became the public face of Toitū Te Tiriti – the organisation that brought 50,000+ people to the precincts of Parliament in opposition to David Seymour’s Treaty Principles Bill.

Reducing social cohesion in New Zealand isn’t a bug in Te Pati Māori’s performative politics; dividing the population along ethnic lines is its defining feature.

Probably just as large, but certainly not as visible as Toitū Tiriti, is the body of Pakeha opinion outraged by the openly seditious flavour of Te Pati Māori’s political message.

Refusing to appear before the Privileges Committee is but the latest affront to the dignity of New Zealand’s parliamentary democracy. Conservative Pakeha are waiting patiently, as their parents taught them, for Parliament’s most powerful committee to compel Te Pati Māori to comply with Standing Orders. The consequences for social cohesion in New Zealand if compliance is not demanded or, worse still, refused, is easily imagined.

Both sides will redouble their efforts to identify the “strong leader” they now believe to be the only remedy for a system that will neither respond to popular pressure nor defend itself against those determined to destroy it.

Back in the late1980s and early 1990s, the promotion of social cohesion went under the name of “the treaty settlement process”. Thirty years later, with the political consequences of that process now weighing heavily upon the nation, the plea for social cohesion is being presented openly, without concealment. That, in itself, is a measure of just how little of it there is left.

The cry for ‘equity’ that is heard with increasing frequency in the 21^st century derives its urgency from the inequalities the 20^th century left unaddressed. Kicking the can down the road is a viable strategy right up until you run out of road.

Without social justice, social cohesion is impossible.

Chris Trotter has more than 30 years’ experience as a political columnist and commentator. He is the author of the Bowalley Rd blog