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Ethnic groups
Contemporary New Zealand has a majority of people of European origin, a significant minority of Māori, and smaller numbers of people from Pacific islands and Asia. In the early 21st century, Asians were the fastest-growing demographic group.
New Zealand was one of the last sizable land areas suitable for habitation to be populated by human beings. The first settlers were Polynesians who traveled from somewhere in eastern Polynesia, possibly from what is now French Polynesia. They remained isolated in New Zealand until the arrival of European explorers, the first of whom was the Dutch navigator Abel Janszoon Tasman in 1642. Demographers estimate that, by the time British naval captain James Cook visited the country in 1769, the Māori population was not much greater than 100,000. They had no name for themselves but eventually adopted the name Māori (meaning “normal”) to distinguish themselves from the Europeans, who, after Cook’s voyage, began to arrive with greater frequency.
The Europeans brought with them an array of diseases to which the Māori had no resistance, and the Māori population declined rapidly. Their reduction in numbers was exacerbated by widespread intertribal warfare (once the Māori had acquired firearms) and by warfare with Europeans. By 1896 only about 42,000 Māori—a small fraction of New Zealand’s total population at the time—remained. Early in the 20th century, however, their numbers began to increase as they acquired resistance to such diseases as measles and influenza and as their birth rate subsequently recovered. By the early 21st century, Māori constituted about one-sixth of New Zealand’s population, and that proportion was expected to increase.
Europeans began to settle in New Zealand in the 1820s. They arrived in increasing numbers after the country was annexed by Great Britain following the signing of the Treaty of Waitangi in 1840. By the late 1850s settlers outnumbered Māori, and in 1900 there were some 772,000 Europeans, most of whom were New Zealand-born. Although the overwhelming majority of immigrants were of British extraction, other Europeans came as well, notably from Scandinavia, Germany, Greece, Italy, and the Balkans. Groups of central Europeans came between World Wars I and II, and a large body of Dutch immigrants arrived after World War II. Since the 1950s there has been a growing community of Pacific island peoples from Samoa (formerly Western Samoa), the Cook Islands, Niue, and Tokelau. Although Chinese and Indian immigrants have long settled in New Zealand, since the 1990s there has been a large growth in migration from Asia.
Languages
New Zealand is predominantly an English-speaking country, though English, Māori, and New Zealand Sign Language are official languages. Virtually all Māori speak English, and about one-fourth of them also speak Māori. The Māori language (te reo Māori) is taught at a number of schools. Other non-English languages spoken by significant numbers of people are Samoan, Hindi, and Mandarin Chinese.
Religion
New Zealand is nominally Christian, with Anglican, Roman Catholic, and Presbyterian denominations being the largest. Other Protestant sects and Māori adaptations of Christianity (the Rātana and Ringatū churches) constitute the remainder of the Christian population.
About one-third of the population does not claim any religious affiliation. Hinduism, Buddhism, and Sikhism have small but growing numbers of adherents. There is no established (official) religion, but Anglican cathedrals are generally used for state occasions.
Settlement patterns
The majority of New Zealanders live in the North Island. The New Zealand countryside is thinly populated, but there are many small towns with populations of up to 10,000 and a number of provincial cities of more than 20,000. Some of the smallest towns and villages have become deserted as people moved to the bigger towns and cities.
The main urban areas are Auckland, in the north of the North Island, the main industrial complex and commercial centre; Hamilton, the centre of the Waikato farming region; Wellington, centrally located at the southern tip of the North Island and the political capital; Christchurch, in the middle of the South Island and the second largest industrial area; and finally, still farther south, Dunedin.
Although New Zealand is notable for the strength of its rural sector, the great majority of people live in cities. There is also a marked difference in the degree of population growth of the two main islands—the North having about three-fourths of the total population, in sharp contrast to the earlier years of systematic settlement. As in the past, the great majority of Māori live in the North Island. After World War II, however, most Māori became urban dwellers, as did migrants from the Pacific islands.
Demographic trends
Life expectancy in New Zealand is generally high, although it is lower for Māori than for non-Māori. The death rate is below the world average. Annual population growth fluctuates but is generally low, comparable to that of other industrialized Western countries. The natural rate of increase tends to be highest among Māori and people of Pacific island heritage.
Immigration is a major contributor to overall population growth in New Zealand, and that has led to frequent debates about limiting immigration. Although in the past most immigrants came from Great Britain and the Netherlands, they have been surpassed by people from the Pacific islands and Asia. Australia is the preferred destination of emigrants. Both immigration and emigration are sensitive to the rate of growth of the New Zealand economy and its employment opportunities as well as to conditions overseas.
Keith Sinclair Raewyn DalzielEconomy of New Zealand
New Zealand’s economy is developed, but it is comparatively small in the global marketplace. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, New Zealand’s standard of living, based on the export of agricultural products, was one of the highest in the world, but after the mid-20th century the rate of growth tended to be one of the slowest among the developed countries. Impediments to economic expansion have been the slow growth of the economy of the United Kingdom (which formerly was the main destination of New Zealand’s exports) and its eventual membership in the European Community (later the European Union) and the high tariffs imposed by the major industrial nations against the country’s agricultural products (e.g., butter and meat). New Zealand’s economic history since the mid-20th century has consisted largely of attempts to grow and diversify its economy by finding new markets and new products (such as wine and paper products), expanding its manufacturing base, and entering into or supporting free-trade agreements.
New Zealand has had a long history of government intervention in the economy, ranging from state institutions’ competing in banking and insurance to an extensive social security system. Until the early 1980s most administrations strengthened and supported such policies, but since then government policy has generally shifted away from intervention, although retaining the basic elements of social security. Most of the subsidies and tax incentives to agricultural and manufacturing exporters have been abolished, and such government enterprises as the Post Office have become more commercially oriented and less dependent on government subsidies. In addition, administrations have attempted to increase the flexibility of the labour market by amending labour laws and encouraging immigration.
Agriculture, forestry, and fishing
New Zealand’s farming base required a relatively complex economy. Highly productive pastoral farming, embracing extensive sheep grazing and large-scale milk production, was made possible by a temperate climate, heavy investment in land improvement (including the introduction of European grasses and regular application of imported fertilizers), and highly skilled farm management by owner-occupiers, who used one of the highest ratios of capital to labour in farming anywhere in the world. The farms supported and required many specialized services: finance, trade, transport, building and construction, and especially the processing of butter, cheese, and frozen lamb carcasses and their by-products. That economy could be described as an offshore European farm, which exported wool and processed dairy products and imported a variety of finished manufactured consumer and capital goods, raw materials, and petroleum. Pastoral farming, especially dairying, has remained significant, but other sectors such as forestry (and the production of paper and other wood products), horticulture, fishing, deer farming, and manufacturing have produced a more-balanced economy. Viticulture has also flourished, and many New Zealand wines have come to rank among the world’s best.
Apart from gold mining’s brief heyday in the mid- to late 19th century, biological resources have always been more significant than minerals. Domesticated animals introduced from Europe thrived in New Zealand. Forestry has always been important, but the emphasis has swung from felling the original forest for timber to afforestation with pine and fir trees for both timber and pulp. Although New Zealand’s forestry industry is small on the world scale, it is a significant supplier of wood products to the Asia-Pacific region.
Resources and power
Most minerals, metallic and nonmetallic, occur in New Zealand, but few are found in sufficient quantities for commercial exploitation. The exceptions are gold, which in the early years of organized settlement was a major export; coal, which is still mined to a considerable extent; iron sands, which are exploited both for export and for domestic use; and, more recently, natural gas. In addition, construction materials, with which the country is well endowed, are quarried.
New Zealand’s energy comes from both fossil fuels and renewable resources such as hydroelectric, wind, and geothermal power. The country has exploited much of its great hydroelectric potential, and hydroelectricity long has supplied the bulk of the country’s power. However, as demand has increased, that proportion has dropped somewhat. Thermal plants fired with coal and natural gas constitute much of the remaining generating capacity, although a small but growing amount comes from geothermal sources. The New Zealand electricity grid has a notable feature in the form of direct-current submarine cables across the Cook Strait. Those link the two main islands, enabling surplus hydroelectric power in the South to be used by the North’s concentration of industry and people. In addition, partnerships between government and private interests developed natural gas reserves and constructed the world’s first plant producing gasoline from natural gas (since closed). There has been some successful offshore drilling for oil reserves.
Manufacturing
Even in the 19th century New Zealand’s relative geographic isolation made necessary a proportionately large industrial labour force engaged in the manufacture and repair of agricultural machinery and in shipbuilding, brewing, and timber processing. After the 1880s the factory processing of farm products swelled those numbers, while the country’s temporary isolation during World Wars I and II stimulated the production of a wide range of manufactured goods that previously had been imported. Protectionist policies first espoused, although weakly, by governments in the late 19th century were strengthened after World War I. From the end of World War II until the early 1970s, manufacturing industries were protected by import-licensing fees in order to maintain full employment. Some labour-intensive, heavily protected, and uneconomic activities—such as automobile and consumer-electronics assembly (with the manufacture of some parts and components)—were developed but were not able to remain competitive. Some industries have taken their manufacturing activities offshore, although the sector has remained significant as an employer and as a contributor to gross domestic product.
