Diversity expert

Words: Philip Matthews Photo: David Unwin

Can I tell you a wee story?’ asks Paul Spoonley. He is on the phone in Auckland and his interviewer is down the line in Christchurch.

He says, ‘‘I went to the UK in 1976 to study at the University of Bristol. I was the son of a Liverpool migrant. I had always been taught that Britain was a tolerant, liberal democracy. But not long after I arrived in Bristol, a few streets over from where I was living, a Pakistani man was held to the ground and a swastika was carved into his tummy with a razor blade. Then, within a few weeks, an Indian woman answered her front door and her sari was doused with petrol and she was set alight.’’

Horrible times. The decline of Britain in the 1970s, the collapse of the post-war consensus, oil shocks and rubbish strikes. Thatcherism was around the corner, exploiting these fears.

It inspired Spoonley to become an academic specialist in Rightwing hate, both in the UK and back home in New Zealand. Forty years after those formative events, he is Pro Vice-Chancellor of the College of Humanities and Social Sciences at Massey University, working between Auckland and Palmerston North. He is also our leading expert on immigration and diversity which is probably tied with climate change as the most urgent issue of our times.

The stories about the UK in the 1970s are a roundabout way of answering this question. Journalists and commentators seemed surprised by the sudden resurgence of Right-wing populism and racism in the Donald Trump campaign, the return of Pauline Hanson in Australia and the Brexit vote in the UK, but were sociologists like Spoonley surprised?

You could argue that it is their job to read the signs and anticipate the waves of history. The rest of us have short memories.

‘‘There are moments when communities feel very anxious about their economic future,’’ he says. ‘‘That’s when you get politicians seeking to capitalise on that. You saw it in the 1990s with NZ First [and Asian immigrants] and you’re seeing it in the US and parts of Europe where antiimmigrant sentiments are expressed.

‘‘So I’m not surprised that single-cause politicians target a particular community as being responsible. If you look back in history, it might have been the Jews. In this country, it was Pacific Islanders and the overstayers campaign in the 70s.’’

He has noticed that NZ First has adopted Trump or Hansonstyle rhetoric about Muslims in recent weeks but has made no political progress with it. ‘‘We don’t have a large Muslim community and Muslims are not a significant part of our immigration inflow.’’

To talk to Paul Spoonley is to actually feel quite good about New Zealand. We are relaxed about national identity. We are tolerant of migrants. We are more diverse than most.

Spoonley gets to represent this tolerant New Zealand at international conferences. In Canada this month he heard debates about immigration and housing in which you could have swapped Vancouver and Toronto for Auckland or Sydney. In Berlin last year he noticed again that New Zealand is ‘‘an outlier’’ when it comes to anxieties about identity and citizenship.

Why, they asked. Partly because we are a small country on the edge of the world without European security concerns. But also because we have been through the growing pains already.

‘‘Our difficult moment was sometime in the 70s and 80s when we had to grow up as a nation, when we couldn’t assume we were all New Zealanders and only New Zealanders, in that old Robert Muldoon quote.’’

We discussed and ‘‘partially resolved’’ issues of minority rights in those years of the Maori political renaissance. ‘‘It dehyphenated the nation state. It said the state manages on behalf of all of us but who exactly is a member of the nation? What Maori did was say there are several nations present.’’

In ways that were hard to predict, we have become not just diverse, but ‘‘superdiverse’’. Nice word but what it does mean?

‘‘Superdiversity is a term coined by a friend of mine, Steve Vertovec, who is a director at the Max Planck Institute in Germany, to signal countries and especially cities that exceeded a threshold of 25 per cent of a population from minority, ethnic and immigrant communities.’’

New Zealand has pushed through that. In Auckland, it goes up to 39 per cent. Include the children of immigrants and Auckland is at an amazing 56 per cent. And it has been fast.

‘‘On most criteria, Auckland is more diverse than any Australian city. You couldn’t have said that a decade ago.’’

The World Migration Report says Auckland is the fourth most diverse city in the world, just behind Toronto, which is the popular example of a diverse city. The top two are Dubai and