AKA: Māori, race relations
Key notes
- When it comes to issues polling, if someone answers "Maori/Treaty" in Curia polling, or "Race relations/racism" in Ipsos polling, we don't know the specific reason why. For example, some respondents may support race-based policies and believe we need more, while others may oppose race-based policies and believe we need less. Even though they might have polar opposite views, they're both voting for the same issue.
- There is no ongoing metric that measures the level of racial cohesion/division in New Zealand. As such, we can only use a data point from a snapshot in time. The best snapshot we have for this comes from Curia's trilogy of research polls on the support and opposition for the Treaty Principles Bill.
- Remember that each Labour-led or National-led government has had coalition partners that share the successes, and the failures, with them. A full list of governments for this time range is at the bottom of this page.
Data sources
Data shown:
- Curia polling October 2024
Full data:
Frequency:
Updated:
Last update:
Next update:
- We are unsure when someone will poll this issue again.
Why this KPI?
- As mentioned earlier, there is no ongoing metric that measures the level of racial cohesion/division in New Zealand. Even one off data sets are rare.
- However, the Treaty Principles Bill was a major issue across New Zealand, is fairly recent, and 3 polls were conducted and published, all by Curia.
- The first poll in October 2023 was superseded by the October 2024 poll. Arguably, this October 2023 poll gave us the truest read on the true support and opposition for the Treaty Principles (~3:1 with 60% support and 18% opposition) before political and media campaigning began and significantly impacted public perceptions. There was little mainstream media coverage in favour of the Bill, and all political parties except ACT also campaigned strongly against it, including National and NZ First.
- The second poll in October 2024 asked the refined question as it would be in a referendum, had it gone ahead. The data is also more recent. This is why we have opted for this version for the KPI graph. The argument against doing so would be that the debate and public perceptions had become hijacked by this point and weren't a fair reflection of the true wishes of the people. That said, there was still 1.8x more support (46%) than opposition (25%).
- The third poll in December 2024 focused on the support/opposition for each of the three principles individually. The support for each principle was 1.9, 1.7, and 4.4x greater than the opposition. However, another question was asked about support vs opposition overall, and this was much closer to 1-to-1 with 39% support to 36% opposition. The disparity in these numbers between showing people the wording versus asking how they felt overall without the wording, shows how politicised the coverage, debate, and feelings had become. As a referendum would not ask for support for each principle individually, nor would it ask for support without showing the wording, we cannot use this data as the lead KPI, so have used the second poll above.
Related facts
Wishlist
With support, we’ll be able to add multiple KPIs for each issue:
- A monthly or quarterly social/racial cohesion measure
Governments over the timeframe shown
- 1984 = Labour
1987 = Labour
- 1990 = National
1993 = National*
1996 = National/NZ First*
- 1999 = Labour/Alliance + Green
2002 = Labour/Progressive + United
2005 = Labour/Progressive + United, NZ First
- 2008 = National + ACT, United, Māori
2011 = National + ACT, United, Māori
2014 = National + ACT, United, Māori
- 2017 = Labour/NZ First+Green
2020 = Labour+Green
- 2023 = National/ACT/NZ First
Sources:1,2 (table 5).
Data published by Stats NZ and Reserve Bank of New Zealand
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Licensed for use under the creative commons attribution licence (BY) 4.0
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