Pre-Trip Information

The indigenous people of New Zealand are the Maori. Like the Vikings, they were once a warrior people who were also great navigators. Like Native Americans, they are a tribal people with a spiritual attachment to the land. Maori have a strong sense of place, and of their past. An oral tradition has preserved tribal genealogies that stretch back to the arrival of the first Maori canoes in New Zealand.

Maoritanga, the Maori way of life, is based on cooperation, loyalty and respect, especially for elders, and is centered on the marae, a gathering place that often incorporates a meetinghouse decorated with highly stylized carvings of tribal ancestors.

Maori have always maintained their identity; in the last 20 years they have renewed their culture. This revival has an economic dimension. The government, honoring old promises embedded in the Treaty of Waitangi, is currently negotiating with Maori tribes to settle historic claims of resources including land, forests and fishing grounds. Maori groups are using their assets to establish commercial ventures, often in partnership with local and foreign investors.

The vast majority -- 75 percent -- of New Zealand's population of approximately 4.2 million are of British origin. Approximately 10 percent claim descent from the indigenous Maori population, which is of Polynesian origin. This number is not absolute, however, as about 450,000 New Zealanders have some degree of Maori ancestry. Asians number about 7 percent of the population; Pacific Islanders account for up to 4 percent of the population; and other Europeans make up the remaining 4 percent.

During the late 1870s, a non-native population increase permanently replaced immigration as the chief contributor to population growth and accounted for more than 75 percent of population growth in the 20^th century. Today, nearly 75 percent of New Zealand's people, including a large majority of the Maoris, live on the North Island. Further, nearly 85 percent of New Zealand's population live in urban areas, where the service and manufacturing industries have established a strong economic base.

In New Zealand, the official language is English, however, Maori is also spoken among the indigenous population. In terms of religion, about 67 percent are Christians of various denominations, such as Anglican, Presbyterian, Roman Catholic, Methodist, Baptist and other Protestants. The remaining 33 percent remains unspecified.

The population of New Zealand has a life expectancy at birth of 80.24 years of age (male: 78.33 years;  female: 82.25 years), an infant mortality rate of  4.99 deaths per 1,000 live births, and a population growth rate of .95 percent, according to recent estimates. In terms of literacy, 99 percent of the population, age 15 and over, could read and write.

About  6.1 percent of GDP is spent in this country on educational expenditures. About 9.7 percent of GDP is spend on health expenditures. Access to sanitation, water,  and health care is considered to be excellent.

It should be noted that human development and social indicators have demonstrated a shift over the colonial period in the situation of New Zealand's Maori people.

In 1865, treaties were signed between Britain and the Maoris, aimed at further defending the Maori title to land. However, the laws continued to be violated by the settlers and the situation of the Maoris declined radically as a cumulative result of disease, poor housing (via loss of land), and alcohol abuse (driven by high incidences of depression). So dramatic were these conditions that by 1896, there were only about 40,000 Maoris left all over New Zealand, a sharp fall of almost 75 percent over the figures barely a century prior.

Such was the state of the Maoris that several academicians had begun talking of Maoris as a race on the brink of extinction from the earth. To date, the plight of an average Maori continues to attract attention of international human rights organizations that have criticized the approach of the New Zealand government towards the issue.  Of concern have been a number of statistics demonstrating, for example, that Maoris retain only five percent of freehold land in New Zealand compared to nearly 100 percent that they owned till 1840. 

At the most basic level, a white New Zealander is over four times more likely than a Maori to attend a university.  As well, New Zealand prisons have far more Maori inmates than the whites, especially in proportion to the population of the two communities. Of non-traffic adult offenders sentenced to imprisonment in 1991, Maoris accounted for 48 percent while they account for barely 12 percent of the population. Europeans, who account for nearly 80 percent of the population, represented only 43 percent of the prison population. Thus, a Maori is nearly 10 times as likely as a European to be imprisoned in New Zealand.

That said, in recent decades, Maoris gradually recovered from population decline and, through interaction and intermarriage with settlers and missionaries, adopted many elements of European culture. In recent decades, Maoris have become increasingly urbanized and more politically active and culturally assertive.


Human Development
 

One notable measure used to determine a country's quality of life is the Human Development Index (HDI), which has been compiled annually since 1990 by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP). The HDI is a composite of several indicators, which measure a country's achievements in three main arenas of human development: longevity, knowledge and education, as well as economic standard of living. In a recent ranking of 169 countries, the HDI placed New Zealand in the very high human development category, at 3rd place.

Although the concept of human development is complicated and cannot be properly captured by values and indices, the HDI, which is calculated and updated annually, offers a wide-ranging assessment of human development in certain countries, not based solely upon traditional economic and financial indicators.

Written by Dr. Denise Youngblood Coleman, Editor in Chief, www.countrywatch.com; see Bibliography for list research sources.