Pasifika communities in New Zealand
- In the 2001 census, 6.7 per cent of the total New Zealand population identified themselves as Pasifika. Of this group, nearly half were Sāmoan.
- After over 60 years of migration to New Zealand, 6 out of 10 Pasifika people are New Zealand-born.
- Pasifika form an increasing percentage of the students in New Zealand schools.
- Pasifika continue to achieve relatively poorly in education and work contexts compared with other ethnic groups in New Zealand.
- Effective teaching makes a real difference to how well Pasifika students achieve in education.
Pasifika population
In the 2001 census, 231,801 people (6.7 per cent of the population) identified themselves as Pasifika. Of this group, 115,017 (nearly half) identified as Sāmoan, 52,569 as Cook Islands Māori, 40,716 as Tongan, and 20,148 as Niuean. Other communities had fewer than 10,000 members: Fijian 7041, Tokelauan 6204, and Tuvaluan 1965. Each community makes an important contribution to the wider Pasifika community in New Zealand. (For further information, see Statistics New Zealand, 2002 and Peddie, 2003.)
Pasifika have been migrating to New Zealand since after the end of World War II, with the most intensive migration taking place in the 1960s and 1970s. Because migration has continued over such a long period, 6 out of 10 Pasifika people in the 2001 census identified themselves as New Zealand-born – that is, as second or third generation migrants (Statistics New Zealand, 2002).
The age profile of New Zealand-born Pasifika is much younger than for other groups in New Zealand. In 2001, the median age for Pasifika was 21, compared with 34.8 for the total population. This younger age profile, combined with a higher growth rate (3.3 per cent per year versus 1 per cent for the total population), has led statisticians to predict that Pasifika peoples will comprise 18.3 per cent of the total New Zealand population by 2051 (Cook, Didham, and Khawaja, 2001). This has important implications for education. Today, 1 in 10 New Zealand students are Pasifika, but by 2051 the proportion may be as high as one in five (Ministry of Pacific Island Affairs, 1999, 2002).
For the latest information and reports on Pasifika people in New Zealand:
- download (PDF 289KB) the snapshot of Pacific peoples from the 2001 census
- view information on culture and identity from the 2006 census at Quickstats
- For an excellent article on Pasifika people in New Zealand, see “From Pacific Islanders to Pacific People and Beyond” (Macpherson, 2004).
Work and residential patterns
Over the 60 years in which they have been migrating to New Zealand, Pasifika have found work mostly in the unskilled manufacturing and service sectors. This occurred because New Zealand began encouraging migration specifically to fill labour shortages in these sectors. However, these sectors were hardest hit in the economic decline of the 1980s and 1990s. As a result, Pasifika in New Zealand have been overrepresented among the unemployed, lower-skilled workers, and low-income earners.
This pattern of low-skill and low-wage work is improving slowly, particularly for younger, New Zealand-born Pasifika, but the trend (improvement) is relatively recent and is occurring among the wider New Zealand population at the same time. As a result, work and income patterns for Pasifika are clearly beginning to improve, but there are still significant ongoing economic disparities between Pasifika people and other New Zealand ethnic groups. (See Ministry of Pacific Island Affairs, 1999, 2002.)
Most Pasifika live in particular residential areas. Some 91.9 per cent of Pasifika live in New Zealand’s major cities, with the majority (79 per cent) in Auckland and Wellington (Macpherson, 2004). The area with most Pasifika is South Auckland: In 2001, just over one in four (72,378) of the Pasifika population lived in the Manukau region. However, small Pasifika communities have settled elsewhere – for example, Tokelauans in Wellington and Cook Islands Māori in Tokoroa. (See Statistics New Zealand, 2002 and 2007, for further information.)
Education
Like most parents, Pasifika parents place great emphasis on formal education. Indeed, many of them came to New Zealand to provide better educational opportunities for their children (Macpherson, 2004).
Despite this parental motivation, Pasifika children have generally achieved less well in education than other groups, particularly in mainstream classrooms, where most Pasifika students are. As one measure of this, they are overrepresented in the so-called ‘literacy tail’, a term used to describe those who achieve least well in national and international English literacy assessments (Ministry of Education, 2003). Pasifika adults also have lower attainment levels in English literacy than all other ethnic groups in New Zealand (Ministry of Education, 2001a).
In the past, this underachievement of Pasifika students and adults has often been attributed to their languages and cultures and explained by ideas based on a subtractive view of bilingualism , in particular, on deficit thinking about Pasifika people’s bilingualism. (See the inquiry Pasifika languages in New Zealand .) Research shows, however, that it is the schooling Pasifika students experience and the degree to which their languages and cultures are valued and included in the teaching and learning process that most determine whether they succeed. These educational experiences and patterns of achievement are discussed more fully in the inquiry Why are Pasifika languages keys to learning? .
The negative educational patterns that continue to hold back many Pasifika students in New Zealand schools are an ongoing cause of concern and something this LEAP resource aims to address as part of the wider Pasifika Education Plan (Ministry of Education, 2001b).
