People are leaving New Zealand in record numbers as unemployment rises, interest rates remain high and economic growth is anaemic, government statistics show.
Data released by Statistics New Zealand on Tuesday showed that 131,200 people departed New Zealand in the year ended June 2024, provisionally the highest on record for an annual period. Around a third of these were headed to Australia.
While net migration, the number of those arriving minus those leaving, remains at high levels, economists also expect this to wane as the number of foreign nationals wanting to move to New Zealand falls due to the softer economy.
The data showed of those departing 80,174 were citizens, which was almost double the numbers seen leaving prior to the COVID-19 pandemic.
When I see headlines like this about colonised places I like to dream that the indigenous people get their land back and eventually wave goodbye to the last settler/colonizer.
I understand and, in principle, agree with the sentiment, but I feel like “indigenous” implies people who’ve been there since prehistory and Aotearoa was uninhabited by humans until about 1320 CE. The “indigenous” Maori only beat the Europeans there by a few hundred years.
Like Vin Diesel said, “winning is winning,” but still, we’re not exactly talking about the kind of margin people like the Aboriginal Australians or the Native Americans had.
The Aztec Empire was founded in 1428 by people who migrated from the north to the Valley of Mexico.
By your reasoning, the Aztecs should not be counted as the indigenous people of the Valley of Mexico. They certainly are considered as such.
Similarly, the Inuit in Greenland only got there after the Vikings. The Vikings died out, the Inuit stayed. Again, they are considered indigenous.
In all three cases- the Aztecs, the Inuit and the Maori, they had developed unique cultures. In the case of the Aztecs and the Maori, Europeans then arrived and destroyed those cultures.
I mean if you really want to be technical, the only place humans are indigenous is the East African Rift Valley.
I would also suggest you look at the second definition here:
I don’t think anyone alive is a coloniser.
The only people that live in new Zealand are locals and immigrants. Even if you removed all the immigrants it would still be full of full blooded white kiwis that have never lived anywhere else and potentially never even met a relative that has lived anywhere else. They are a New Zealander.