Chinese, Indians, Filipinos And Pacific Islanders—In New Zealand, The Great Replacement Is Proceeding Apace
Here in New Zealand, the Great Replacement is proceeding apace. Data recently released by our Statistics department shows that the proportion of New Zealanders who are of European extraction dropped to 55.9% of the population at the time of the 2023 Census. At current rates of demographic change, “New Zealand Europeans” are in danger of becoming a minority in the not so distant future.
New Zealand has arguably existed as a nation since the signing of the Treaty of Waitangi in 1840 (historians will debate when nationhood was attained, but for our purposes this is as good a milestone as any). For the majority of time since then the country has been of majority European origin—made up predominantly of settlers from Britain, with an indigenous Maori minority. This demographic configuration was stable for over a century and forms the core of our national identity. As recently as 1996 New Zealand still had a population that was 82.3% white, with the majority of the remainder being Maori.
Things are very different now, as the ethnic breakdown in this table shows:
In recent decades, like many Western nations, New Zealand has embarked on a policy of mass immigration that is resulting in profound demographic and cultural changes in the country. We have imported large numbers of Chinese, Indians and Pacific Islanders, among other groups, that have radically changed the cultural fabric of the nation.
New Zealand now has a population of just over 5.3 million people, and we are experiencing gross migrant inflows of over 200,000 people year on year. This equates to around 4% of our population arriving every year.
[Source]
These levels of immigration are on par with, if not greater than, the highest in the Western world. Going back to 1996 again, our population was only 3.7 million. The floodgates have well and truly been opened.
One curiosity here is in how our Statistics department, Stats NZ, is reporting the data. To put together the table above I’ve had to do my own analysis using the detailed tables found here. The headline ethnicity numbers Stats NZ is reporting differ, because rather than separating out the mixed categories, they are double counting people with mixed ethnicities—i.e. someone of mixed Maori and European ethnicity, who ticks both boxes on the census form, is counted twice, once in each category, rather than being put into a separate mixed category as I have done in the table above. As a result, in Stats NZ’s presentation, some of the ethnic categories (particularly European and Maori) are inflated and the total sums to more than 100%.
This is statistically criminal, and makes a nonsense of their figures. It is difficult to believe that the government statisticians who compiled this data would not have been aware of the error they were making here, which, if true, leads one to the likely conclusion that they may have done this deliberately in order to obfuscate the real demographic situation.
As a side note, I’m also aware of funny business occurring with the Australian census, where there has recently been a push to remove questions about ethnicity while simultaneously adding more questions about gender and sexual identity. Trying to fiddle with the way official statistics are gathered and reported may be a tactic many of our governments begin using to hide the facts about the Great Replacement - something to look out for in future.
The changes to the demographics and cultural fabric are obvious, but another result of our high rates of immigration is that New Zealand has had a persistent housing crisis over the last couple of decades that governments of both left and right have proven unable to solve. Our country is also struggling with an “infrastructure deficit” and our public services, such as our public health system, are stretched to breaking point. Yet no one in the government or mainstream media seems capable of joining the dots between our very large immigration inflows and these problems.
Another development that has emerged in recent months is the high number of New Zealand citizens now leaving the country. 81,000 New Zealand citizens migrated out of New Zealand in the year to July 2024 (the most recent data release at the time of writing). This is a new record. Tens of thousands of Indians, Chinese and Filipinos are flowing in, and tens of thousands of Kiwis are leaving.
Despite the scale of our immigration and demographic challenges, the immigration issue is yet to capture public attention in New Zealand in the same way it has in the US, UK and elsewhere. Although we held an election in October 2023 and turfed out the Labour Government of Jacinda Ardern, the critical issues in that election campaign were the cost of living and “co-governance”—a policy about giving often unelected Maori representatives disproportionate say in our local government and elsewhere —not immigration.
But if current immigration rates (both inward and outward) continue, there is a real risk that European New Zealanders, as StatsNZ calls them, will fall below 50% of the population by the time of the next census. Given how close our country is to this historic turning point, and given the problems these issues are causing in the country, one wonders how long we can continue without public debate about immigration and demographic change.
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