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NEW ZEALAND SOCIETY
New Zealand is a very equalitarian society with a large middle class.
Even though New Zealand has reputation for being of land of sheep farmers and outdoorsmen, over 85 percent of its population lives in urban or suburban areas.
Marriage and family customs are similar to those in the United States and Europe. Women make approximately half of the New Zealand's workforce. The Plunker Society is a state-subsided organization that has set up Plunker Rooms all over the country, where parents can change the diapers of their young children.
New Zealand is not necessarily the Eden many people make it out to be. Glue sniffing, which is not illegal, is a big problem in some downtown areas. Motorcycle gangs deal hard drugs and half the country's prison population is Maori.
Suicide rates for young men between 15 and 24 (suicides per 100,000 in 1991-93): New Zealand (39.9); Australia (24.6); the United States (21.9); rural China (17.4); Singapore (10.2); Japan (10.1); Hong Kong (9.7); urban China (5.6).
Some psychologists blame the high suicide rate for young men in Australia and New Zealand on the masculine ideal of strong, uncomplaining man.
New Zealand Customs
New Zealanders tend to be very casual and relaxed. They greet each other with "Gidday" and often address each other on a first name basis. Social customs are more or less the same as those in the United States and Europe. A victory sign with the palm towards you is regarded as an obscene gesture in New Zealand.
Punctuality is important to New Zealanders but tipping is not. New Zealanders often drop in on one another without calling. They often visit around tea time (between 3:00pm and 5:00pm).
New Zealand still retains many British customs. Some judges wear wigs, tea time is a popular afternoon ritual, lawn bowling, rugby and cricket are three of the county's most popular sports, and knighthoods are still highly sought after.
New Zealanders eat British-style with their knife in one hand and their fork in the other hand. The knife is used for cutting and pushing food onto the fork. Sometimes Kiwis eat without talking. At dinner parties, Kiwis tend to eat right away rather than after having cocktails and drinks first. After dinner men often sit around together and drink beer while women gather in the kitchen and chat and help the hostess with dishes.
Cities, Homes and Rural Areas in New Zealand
Many New Zealand towns look like something out of “Anne of Green Gables”. They are often surrounded by farms with dairy cows, sheep or horses. New Zealand cities remind many people of English suburbs from the 1950s.
Most New Zealanders live in wooden two- or three-bedroom, single-story, detached houses set in quarter "sections" (lots) in city suburbs or rural towns. Houses usually have a yard and garden. The number of people living in apartments is increasing.
The New Zealand government provides housing supplements and low-income housing for those in need.
Rural population: 14 percent. In the 1920s over 80 percent of the population worked the land. Today the figure is only about 10 percent.
The pioneers who opened the highland stations in the Southern Alps had no electricity and had to chop wood, heat water over an open fire, and wash everything by hand. "It was a hard life," one highlander told National Geographic, "but we loved it."
In some remote areas of New Zealand mail only arrives once a week by plane and one of the biggest events is when the three-times-a-year Country Library Service van shows up. In some places vegetable stands have no workers and people pay using the honor system. In other places, people still use old fashion wind-up phones where one family answers the phone if it rings twice, and another answers it if there is one long ring, followed by a short ring.
Food and Drink in New Zealand
McDonald's in New Zealand offer Kiwi Burgers (hamburgers with a fried egg, and a slice of beef on top of a ground beef patty).
The New Zealand national food is a salty black gooey paste called Marmite. Similar to Australian Vegemite and spread on bread, it is derived from the silty material left behind when beer is made. New Zealand children are nourished on butter and marmite sandwiches the same way American children are on peanut butter and jelly. Marmite is high in vitamin B, and has been popular since before World War II.
Tea is popular. Every year New Zealanders consume more than a half million cubic meters of beer, quite a lot for small nation.
New Zealanders eat British-style with their knife in one hand and their fork in the other hand. The knife is used for cutting and pushing food onto the fork. Sometimes Kiwis eat without talking. At dinner parties, Kiwis tend to eat right away rather than after having cocktails and drinks first. After dinner men often sit around together and drink beer while women gather in the kitchen and chat and help the hostess with dishes.
Alcohol Consumption Per Capita: total: 9.17 liters of pure alcohol (2019 estimate); beer: 3.41 liters of pure alcohol (2019 estimate); wine: 2.88 liters of pure alcohol (2019 estimate); spirits: 1.62 liters of pure alcohol (2019 estimate); other alcohols: 1.26 liters of pure alcohol (2019 estimate); ranking compared to other countries in the world: 32. [Source: CIA World Factbook 2023]
New Zealand Wine
Even though New Zealand has one of the world's youngest wine industries (it didn't get really going until the 1970s), it produces some first class wines. Some vintages have done surprisingly well in international competitions.
Washington Post wine critic Michael Franz wrote: "New Zealand's unusual combination of very intense sunlight and a very cool climate makes for a remarkable conjunction of dense, rich fruit and bright, refreshing acidity."
The Sauvignon Blancs and Chardonnays are especially good. "In terms of weight and richness," Franz wrote, "Chardonnays from New Zealand are akin to the best from California or Australia, but in terms of structure and acidity they recall the great Chardonnays of Burgundy."
New Zealand exported 16.2 million liter of wine to 50 countries in 1998.
Drugs, Clothes and Sex in New Zealand
The levels of marijuana smoking and drug abuse in New Zealand is comparable to other Western countries. There is some glue sniffing in poor urban areas.
Relatively few Kiwis smoke. Percentage of Population That Uses Tobacco: total: 13.7 percent (2020 estimate); male: 15 percent (2020 estimate); female: 12.3 percent (2020 estimate); ranking compared to other countries in the world: 111. [Source: CIA World Factbook 2023]
Many New Zealand men have beards.
New Zealanders like to wear loose fitting clothes, shorts, sweaters, knee socks and comfortable shoes. Some even wear shorts when they hike in the snow.
A New Zealand female school teacher was jailed for having a long term sexual relationship with a ten year old boy.
New Zealand, along with Australia, France, Germany and the Unites States, have extraterritorial laws on their books which make child-sex offenses committed by their citizens abroad punishable at home.
Immigrants, Polynesians and Asians
Around 80 percent of New Zealanders identify themselves as having some European ancestry, their forebears having come mainly from Britain but also from Ireland, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Greece, the former Yugoslavia and other European nations.
Until around 1990, most immigrants to New Zealand came from Europe, Australia and Pacific Islands such as Samoa and Tonga. Since 1990, most of the immigrants have come from South Africa, Hong Kong, Taiwan, China, South Korea, Japan, Malaysia and Singapore. These days the term immigrant is generally used to describe immigrants from Asia not immigrants from Britain and South Africa even though many of them arrived around the same time as the Asians.
Many of the Asians have arrived with considerable amounts of money and settled in white middle class areas with good schools in the Auckland area. One economist has estimated that immigrants have injected US$1.7 billion a year into the New Zealand economy, quite a hefty some for a country with only 3.6 million people. Most of that money has come from Asians.
Auckland is regarded as the world's largest Polynesian city. Samoans, Tongans, Fijians, Cook Islanders have come here, and to other New Zealand cities, for a better life. It is estimated that by the year 2000 one out of every three Ne Zealanders will be Polynesian or Maori. European New Zealanders often refer to people from the South Pacific as islanders.
Stereotypes and Racism
According to the writer Paul Theroux, many white New Zealanders regard the Maori as lazy trouble makers, the Tongans as "descent chaps," Samoans as aggressive drunks and the Fijians as former cannibals.
Describing the perceptions of white New Zealanders of non-whites, Theroux wrote, "Islanders were religious, islanders were gamblers and drinkers, islanders were devoted to their families, islanders were dole scroungers, islanders fought among themselves, islanders were economic refugees, islanders were villains. They towed your car away at night and the next day demanded money to return it. They practiced extortion, protection rackets, mugging and racial violence."
Callers to talk show radio in New Zealand often complain about the health and welfare system "abuses" by the Maori and the affluent lifestyles, Triad-like criminal activities, and bad driving habits of Asians.
Immigrants have told the Evening Post newspaper in Wellington that New Zealanders are "friendly and gentle" on a one to one basis but found their "racist public statements" threatening and scary. A survey by the newspaper found that half the Asian migrants interviewed were so concerned by anti-immigrant sentiments that have become especially pronounced in the 1990s they have considered leaving.
Some Asians feel they are ignored and their concerns are given a backseat to those of the Maori. Some Maori worry that Asians will take employment opportunities away from them.
Even with all this, white New Zealanders, like white Australians, have made much more an effort than majority groups in other countries to address the concerns of indigenous people and compensate them for wrongs done in the past. They certainly have done more for the Maori than white Americans have done for native American Indians.
Image Sources: Wikimedia Commons
Text Sources: New Zealand Tourism Board, New Zealand Herald, New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, The Guardian, National Geographic, The New Yorker, Reuters, Associated Press, Wikipedia, BBC, CNN and various books and other publications.
Last updated March 2023