A growing population

At certain times in New Zealand history, particularly in the 1840s and the 1850s, the vast majority of the increase in the population came from migration. Because of course people hadn’t been here for very long, they hadn’t had time to have children, and so the increase in population was almost entirely from immigration. And right through the 19th century, right through until the beginning of the First World War, the first century of New Zealand existence, round about 50 percent of the increase in the population came from immigration. So if you’d walked round New Zealand a hundred years ago, and listened, you would have heard a lot of different accents, because an awful lot of the people, and particularly of course all the adults, would have spoken with a different accent. There would have been a lot of Scots accents, because at that stage something like a quarter of the people who had come to New Zealand had come from Scotland. About a fifth of them had come from Ireland. And yet I’ve heard even from the people that came from England, they often came from different parts of England. They came from down in Cornwall, so they would have a very strong Cornish accent. So you know for a long time, in the 19th century New Zealand was quite a sort of multi cultural society because it had people from lots of different immigrant groups, and all of whom…..and they were a high proportion of the population.

Obviously in the 20th century the number of people who were born here has increased, but there has been a big increase in population from immigration in the last 20 years, particularly since the mid-1980s, when we relaxed our immigration policy, and a big increase in the kinds of people who came from New Zealand, came from outside the traditional areas such as Britain. This is a good graph that will show you something of interest. Now this shows… the big increase in the number of Pacific born people in New Zealand from 1961 to 2001. So as you can see in 1961, there were only about 15,000 people living in New Zealand from the Pacific Islands, and by 2001 there were getting on for 150,000 who had been born in the Pacific living in New Zealand. So there has been a dramatic increase in that community in the last 30 or 40 years.