Tag: Maori economic development
Source: New Zealand Crime and Safety Survey, Resources & downloads | New Zealand Ministry of Justice.
Source: New Zealand Crime and Safety Survey, Resources & downloads | New Zealand Ministry of Justice.
Much of the non-European human capital in New Zealand is Maori and it far exceeded $39 billion 20 years ago or more. Attempts to quantify the Maori economy by counting up the value of Maori institutions and businesses distracts from the main priority for Maori economic development which is education, education, education.
Source: Lˆe Thi. Vˆan Tr`ınh, Estimating the monetary value of the stock of human capital for New Zealand, University of Canterbury PhD thesis (September 2006), Table 4.6: Aggregate human capital stock by ethnicity.
Source: OECD Economic Survey New Zealand 2015.
From 1965 onwards, 1/3rd of terrestrial Australia – 2.5 million sq kms of land – was returned to indigenous owners, with half of that since the Native Title decision in 1993. Tasmania pioneered aboriginal land rights with the Cape Barron Island Act 1912.
Source: Jon Altman, The political ecology and political economy of the Indigenous land titling ‘revolution’ in Australia, March 2014 Māori Law Review.
New Zealand extinguished native title twice in its history with the 2nd of these takings of Māori land by the last Labour government with the foreshore and seabed legislation. In her op-ed today, has Jacinda Ardern forgotten why the Māori party came into being?
Unlike New Zealand, Australia welcomed migrants from a wide range of ethnicities after the Second World War. It abolished the White Australia policy in the 1960s along with any discrimination in its Constitution against aboriginals.
Australia takes 8 times as many refugees as New Zealand on a per capita basis.
Sweden – the OECD's highest per capita recipient of asylum seekers bit.ly/1vfFEUh http://t.co/y6DmdJjAsE—
Guardian Data (@GuardianData) December 02, 2014
This redress of indigenous grievances was done out of the generosity of the Australian heart. Aboriginals are a tiny minority in Australia with little independent political pull.
Pakeha and Pasifika real household incomes increased by 55% since the low point of 1994. Maori household incomes increased by 65% since 1994.
Source: Bryan Perry, Household Incomes in New Zealand: trends in indicators of inequality and hardship 1982 to 2014 – Ministry of Social Development, Wellington (August 2015), Table D.6.
The Council of Trade Unions and Closer Together Whakatata Mai charted similar statistics to show that everything has gone to hell in a hand basket since neoliberalism seized power in New Zealand in 1984 and in particular after the passing of the Employment Contracts Act in 1991.
Source: Income Gap | New Zealand Council of Trade Unions – Te Kauae Kaimahi.
The passage of the Employment Contracts Act greatly reduced union power and union membership and with it wages growth in New Zealand, according to what is left of the New Zealand union movement.
Source: Income Gap | New Zealand Council of Trade Unions – Te Kauae Kaimahi.
Unfortunately, both charts of the same statistics show the exact opposite to what was intended by The Council of Trade Unions and Closer Together Whakatata Mai.
Even the most casual inspection of the data charted above and reproduced below with some annotations shows that real wages growth returned to New Zealand in the early 1990s after 20 years of real wage stagnation.
Source: Income Gap | New Zealand Council of Trade Unions – Te Kauae Kaimahi.
The reforms of the 1980s stopped what was a long-term decline in average real wages. The reforms of the early 1990s including the passing of the Employment Contracts Act was followed by the resumption of sustained growth in average real wages with little interruption since.
Closer Together Whakatata Mai has even stumbled onto the great improvements in household incomes across all ethnicities since the early 1990s.
The increase in percentage terms of Maori and Pasifika real household income is much larger than for Pakeha. As Bryan Perry (2015, p. 67) explains when commenting on the very table D6 sourced by Closer Together Whakatata Mai:
From a longer-term perspective, all groups showed a strong rise from the low point in the mid 1990s through to 2010. In real terms, overall median household income rose 47% from 1994 to 2010: for Maori, the rise was even stronger at 68%, and for Pacific, 77%. These findings for longer- term trends are robust, even though some year on year changes may be less certain. For 2004 to 2010, the respective growth figures were 21%, 31% and 14%.
Source: Bryan Perry, Household Incomes in New Zealand: trends in indicators of inequality and hardship 1982 to 2014 – Ministry of Social Development, Wellington (August 2015), Table D6.
As Closer Together Whakatata Mai documented, incomes increased in real terms by 14% for the bottom and 19% for the middle.
Perry noted that in the lowest decile had too many implausible incomes including many on zero income so he was wary of relying on it. I have therefore charted the second, median and top decile before and after housing costs below. All three deciles charted showed substantial improvements in incomes both before and after housing costs.
Source: Bryan Perry, Household Incomes in New Zealand: trends in indicators of inequality and hardship 1982 to 2014 – Ministry of Social Development, Wellington (August 2015).
Naturally, measuring changes in living standards over long periods of time is fraught with under-estimation. There are new goods to be accounted for and product upgrades too.
The apps in your smartphone cost $900,000 thirty years ago —@datarade https://t.co/pjw7q4QGDp—
Vala Afshar (@ValaAfshar) October 29, 2015
From a longer-term perspective, all groups showed a strong rise from the low point in the mid 1990s through to 2010. In real terms, overall median household income rose 47% from 1994 to 2010: for Maori, the rise was even stronger at 68%, and for Pacific, 77%.
These findings for longer- term trends are robust, even though some year on year changes may be less certain. For 2004 to 2010, the respective growth figures were 21%, 31% and 14%.
Source: Bryan Perry, Household Incomes in New Zealand: trends in indicators of inequality and hardship 1982 to 2014 – Ministry of Social Development, Wellington (August 2015), Table D6.
The Race Relations Commissioner Dame Susan Davoy has called for Te Reo Māori to be compulsory in New Zealand schools. She said being bilingual would be “a real added advantage” to young Kiwis and more people knowing Te reo Māori would help race relations.
Learning another language is not a priority for the Pākehā children or Māori mokupuna when you consider the poor literacy rates among Māori, Pasifika and Pākehā. The priority for children in an English speaking country is to master English. Too many children leave school with inadequate reading and writing skills.
Figure 1: Prose literacy by ethnicity, 2011
Source: Literacy skills of young adult New Zealanders | Education Counts.
Lower levels of literacy and numerously are much higher among Māori and Pasifika children. Pākehā consistently having a larger proportion in the higher levels of prose literacy.
Figure 2: Prose literacy rates by ethnicity, 1996 and 2006
Source: Indicator 9: Literacy rates — Office of the Auditor-General New Zealand.
60%of Pākehā are above the minimum level of competence to meet the prose literacy requirements of a knowledge society. This contrasts with the majority of Māori and Pasifika who are below the minimum level of competence.
Furthermore, requiring children who do not have an aptitude for language or school in general to learn a language will reinforce in those who are not doing well that they are not very smart. This will give them more reasons to hate school and leave as soon as possible and never go back.
The key to helping children who do not have an aptitude to succeed greatly at school is to find the subjects where they do do well so they can get a good start to life. If students are not good at academic subjects, requiring them to do more academic studies such as study language is fool-hardy.
Taking resources, and more importantly, students learning time away from basic literacy skills will do little for a Māori economic development and race relations. This is because this taking resources and student learning time away from literacy and basic education will slow the closing of income gaps between Māori and others.
Language is a network good. It pays to join the largest network so you can communicate and do business with more people. The wage premium for immigrants learning English in English-speaking’s countries is about 15%.
Learning Te reo Māori will not help children in their other subjects. The psychology of the transfer of learning was founded 100 years ago to explore the hypothesis that learning Latin gave the student muscle to learn other subjects, both other languages and generally learn faster.
Educational psychologists found that Latin does not help much in studying other languages and other subjects. No significant differences were found in deductive and inductive reasoning or text comprehension among students with 4 years of Latin, 2 years of Latin or no Latin at all.
