Far From One Nation

Just over half of all the Polynesians in the world today live in Aotearoa-land of the long white cloud, or New Zealand.

What happens to one of the world's newest hybrid cultures has implications across the Pacific. Culturally, politically, socially and economically, New Zealand has become Polynesia's capital. And it celebrates the fact.

It is not without tension, however, and the political complexities of the relationship between the Tangata Whenua or people of the land, as many Maori now prefer to be called, and the Pakeha or whites, will always test the nation's democratic and legal systems.

A beverage company here advertises its soda with the engaging slogan "World Famous in New Zealand," which doubles as an explanation for the mindset in this odd, isolated and surprisingly small nation.

The whole world, for example, recognizes that Wright Brothers were the first to fly, but what about Richard Pearse, the South Island farmer who, Kiwis believe, flew months before? Lack of proof means he is World Famous in only in New Zealand.

Photo: Kalani Ladd

New Zealand this year topped four million people, but for as long as anybody can remember, the South Pacific nation has long been punching above its weight. The cavalcade of Nobel winners, writers, doctors, eccentrics and sports teams is quite out of proportion to the numbers who call themselves kiwis.

Until a couple of months ago New Zealanders held two of the top world diplomatic posts: head of the World Trade Organization, Mike Moore, and, still, head of the Commonwealth, Don McKinnon. The smart political money says current Prime Minister Helen Clark is already eying up Kofi Annan's job as United Nations secretary general.

It's not bad considering New Zealand has fewer people than 60 world cities and on some days there are more people on the Ghinza, on Mumbai's morning trains, in Oxford Street or strolling along Fifth Avenue than can be found here.

Statistics New Zealand's Brian Pink said a new New Zealander was born every six minutes 48 seconds and the four millionth arrived on Apr. 21 this year. "This is a significant event for New Zealand," he says. "It has taken nearly 30 years to reach this milestone, after reaching three million in 1973."

While most of the population growth is from births over deaths, rather than from migration, the rate of growth is slowing and the population is expected to peak at 4.81 million in 2046.

According to the 2001 census-the most recent-one in seven people in New Zealand, 526,281, were of Maori ethnicity. The term is suitably vague in a country where the definition of race amounts to a personal question of whatever you feel like. Adding to the Polynesian mix are the 231,800 Pacific Islanders, around half of them Samoans followed by Cook Islanders, Tongans, Niueans, indigenous Fijians, Tokelauans and Tuvaluans. The biggest Polynesian city-consequently the world's biggest Polynesian city-is Manukau City in South Auckland where a quarter of the citizens are Polynesian.

The growth of the Pacific population has been a key feature of New Zealand development. Until the 1960s it was the product of a colonial relationship, notably with Samoa and the Cook Islands. With independence of those nations the relationship changed with Pacific Islanders providing cheap, unskilled labor and, at times, controversy as many flouted immigration laws to stay.

At the turn of the current century though the Pacific Islanders were different: the majority (58 percent) were born in New Zealand and the Pacific population is very youthful and should continue to grow rapidly for some time to come. It is also a very diverse population made up of people from many different ethnic groups occupying a range of social and economic positions. In the last decade or so, SNZ says Pacific Islanders have sharply improved their levels of education, unemployment has fallen and there has been a move away from the traditional areas of blue-collar employment into more skilled white-collar jobs.

"Pacific peoples are a growing voting force. They represent a large share of the growth in consumer markets and consumer-oriented education and health services and, by 2050, they will be one of the largest consumer groups in Auckland," SNZ says.

Of the Tangata Whenua, nearly 90 percent live in Te ika-a-Maui, the "fish of Maui," or the North Island, with the balance in Te Wai Pounamu, the Island of Jade or the South Island. The largest iwi or tribe is Ngapuhi in the northern part of the North Island.

While being a young nation New Zealand is, paradoxically, one of the oldest continuous democracies in the world; first to give votes to women and quickly in its politically life, having indigenous people in Parliament. Without a written constitution its founding document is the Treaty of Waitangi, signed in the hamlet of the same name in the Bay of Islands in 1840. There were two versions of the document; one in Maori and the other in English and neither say quite the same thing.

Photo: Kalani Ladd

For much of its life the Treaty was honored more in the breach than in the observance, but since the late 1970s it has been an article of political faith that the Tangata Whenua and Pakeha communities needed to be reconciled and in order to do that the injustices meted out to Maori had to be recognized, apologized for and compensated. Much of the dramatic work has been done although this year the issue has taken a new intensity over ownership of the nation's seabed and foreshore.

Many believed that under the treaty they held customary ownership, but in a nation given to appeasing a conservative white vote, the government stepped in and said it would change the law to say that this was owned by the state, and not the tribes. It is an issue that threatens the nation with some vigorous and tense debate in the next year or two.

In the sloganeering that goes on in this kind of issue, the White Right often latch on to the notion of "One Nation, One People" and use it to argue against what they see as special favors for Maori and Pacific Islanders. But tragically the problem is that despite all the social and economic advances, New Zealand is far from One Nation.

A shocking Ministry of Health report in July revealed that indigenous Maori and Pacific Islanders made no life expectancy gains in two decades while the majority white population had experienced a dramatic improvement. Mortality trends coincide with radical social and economic changes introduced into the country in the 1980s and 1990s.

"We've known for some time that ethnic identity is an important dimension of health inequalities in New Zealand, but this is the first time that robust ethnic mortality rates have been available, allowing the full extent of the disparity to be documented," Ministry of Health spokesman Dr. Don Matheson said.

"Such health inequalities are unacceptable."

Being such a young nation, New Zealanders have a young history to try and define themselves. Almost from the time New Zealand became a nation (a vague concept in a country without an independence day as such) its people have been cutting a dash. People like Anthony Wilding, in his day the greatest ever tennis player, taking the Wimbledon men's finals four years running-then going off to World War One and death at Ypres. The country has produced plenty of warriors, including the only combat soldier to ever win two Victoria Crosses for gallantry, Charles Upham. A New Zealander won the Nobel Prize for physics in 1908, atom splitter Ernest Rutherford. Another kiwi, Maurice Wilkins, got it in 1962, for identifying the double helix of DNA with Francis Crick and James Watson. Author Janet Frame is routinely tipped as a Nobel Prize winner for Literature, although she hasn't written anything new for years.

New Zealanders have been winning Oscars way out of proportion to their numbers and director Peter Jackson has managed to turn Lord of the Rings into a kiwi fairy story without the British noticing.

Easily the most famous New Zealander, perhaps ever, is Sir Edmund Hillary, who with Nepalese Tenzing Norgay got to the top of Mount Everest first in 1953.

Author Alan Mulgan wrote in Report on Experience in 1945, after a brutal war in the underground in Yugoslavia, that New Zealand was a hard and sinewy country that will outlast many who try to alter it.

"This is one reason why New Zealanders, a young people but already with a place in history, are often wanders and restless and unhappy men," he wrote.

"They come from the most beautiful country in the world, but it is a small country and very remote. After a while this isolation oppresses them and they go aboard. They roam the world looking not for adventure but for satisfaction. They run service cars in Iraq, gold mines in Nevada or newspapers in Fleet Street.

"They are a queer, lost, eccentric, pervading people who will seldom admit to the deep desire that is in all of them to go home and live quietly in New Zealand again."