The New New Zealand: Facing demographic disruption

Description

In 2030 there may be six million of us. One and a half million of us will live overseas. We will be clustered in Auckland, dependent on migration, and worried about a shortage of workers. We haven't planned for this. We need to. This major new book by Distinguished Professor Paul Spoonley, New Zealand's preeminent commentator on population trends, looks at our rapidly growing and changing population and the demographic disruption it is already causing. To his mind, we are not taking enough notice of this disruption, and New Zealand urgently needs a population policy. With chapters like 'OK Boomer' and 'Why Would Anyone Want to Live in Auckland?' this book is urgent, provocative and will fuel many a dinner-party and policy-making conversation.

Distinguished Professor Paul Spoonley is one of New Zealands leading academics and a Fellow of the Royal Society Te Aparangi. He has led numerous externally funded research programmes, has has written or edited 25 books and is a regular commentator in the news media. In 2010, he was a Fulbright SeniorScholar at the University of California, Berkeley, and in 2013, a Senior Visiting Fellow at the Max Planck Institute of Religious and Ethnic Diversity in Goettingen. He was awarded the Royal Society of New Zealand Science and Technology medal in 2009 in recognition of his academic scholarship, leadership and public contribution to cultural understanding and in 2011, his contribution to Sociology was acknowledged with the Sociological Association of Aotearoa New Zealands scholarship for exceptional service to New Zealand sociology.

'Writing, let alone reading, a book about demographic disruption in a year characterized by the massive disruption of Covid-19 might seem a little like an exercise of adding misery to woe. And while this book, by Massey University's Paul Spoonley, was mostly written prior in 2019 while he was on sabbatical in Germany, much of it had to be amended quickly as the publishing date coincided with the emergence of coronavirus in 2020. In its way, the book is even better for that. The themes of the book take on a different perspective, greater urgency even, in the light of the further pressure that they will be placed under because of the impacts of Covid-19.' - Andrew Butcher, Principal, Bethlehem Tertiary Institute