Lindsay Mitchell wrote a fine reply to the Amnesty International report suggesting that higher rates of child poverty among Māori and Pasifika is evidence of systematic discrimination.
Māori and Pasifika children were disproportionately in poverty, highlighting systemic discrimination
Figure 1: Real equivalised median household income (before housing costs) by ethnicity, 1988 to 2013 ($2013)
Source: Bryan Perry, Household incomes in New Zealand: Trends in indicators of inequality and hardship 1982 to 2013. Ministry of Social Development (July 2014).
The facts are clear, whatever systematic discrimination there might be, it must be falling rapidly because of the rapid increases in household real incomes in Mari and Pacific households in the last 20 years.
As shown in figure 1 below, between 1994 and 2010, real equivalised median New Zealand household income rose by 47%; for Māori, this rise was 68%; for Pasifika, the rise in real equivalised median household income was 77%.
Our friends on the Left cannot argue that an income gap is evidence of discrimination while arguing that a rapid closing of that gap is not evidence of falling discrimination? To do this, to paint pre-1984 New Zealand, pre-neoliberal New Zealand as an egalitarian paradise has to ignore up to two thirds of the population and the inequalities they suffered:
“New Zealand up until the 1980s was fairly egalitarian, apart from Māori and women, our increasing income gap started in the late 1980s and early 1990s,” says Max Rashbrooke.
The large improvements in Māori incomes since 1992 were based on rising Māori employment rates, fewer Māori on benefits or zero incomes, more Māori moving into higher paying jobs, and greater Māori educational attainment (Dixon and Maré 2007). Labour force participation rates of Māori increased from 45% in the late 1980s to about 62% in the last few years. Māori unemployment reached a 20-year low of 8 per cent from 2005 to 2008.
Rapid social improvement among Māori and Pasifika is simply ignored as an inconvenient truth for the Left over Left.
Utopia, you are standing in it! 
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