Maori Economic Inequality: Reading Outside Our Comfort Zone

Abstract

In Aotearoa–New Zealand as elsewhere in the world, the 2008 global financial crisis and ensuing critique of the global political economy that enabled it shifted focus away from cultural identity and onto socioeconomic inequality. Since the 1980s, the number of poor New Zealanders has doubled, with 20 per cent today living below the poverty line, with Maori disproportionately affected by poverty, precarity and social indicators including unemployment, educational achievement, health and morbidity. Not only do Maori underperform, the gap between Maori and Pakeha has widened in almost all social indicators for which data have been collected since the 1980s. The narrative of the cultural equality of biculturalism has run in parallel with social and economic inequality, with the two discourses hardly touching each other. Indeed, the terms and parameters of the identity politics of difference have masked the insidious effects of that other national sea-change of the 1980s, the irruption of free-market neo-liberalism. While Maori literature and its critical analysis support biculturalism, striking hierarchies of material inequality within Maori society remain understated in the fiction and ignored in critique. This essay traces the history of economic inequality lightly registered in Maori fiction, and argues the inability to tackle Maori poverty head-on reflects the broader national and international difficulty of naming and defining the current era of neo-liberal capitalism that post-2008 responses to the financial crisis have identified.

• Inequality
• Maori fiction
• neo-liberalism
• New Zealand poverty
• precarity