The New New Zealand Facing demographic disruption

by Spoonley, Paul

• ISBN13: 9780995122987
• ISBN10: 0995122989
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2020-10-01
• Publisher: Massey University Press

Summary

In this timely book, New Zealand’s best-known commentator on population trends, Distinguished Professor Paul Spoonley, shows how, as New Zealand moves into the 2020s, the demographic dividends of the last 70 years are turning into deficits. Our population patterns have been disrupted. More boomers, fewer children, an ever bigger Auckland, and declining regions are the new normal. We will need new economic models, new ways of living. Spoonley says: "It is not a crisis (even if at times it feels like it), but rather something that needs to be understood and responded to. But I fear that policy-makers and politicians are not up to the challenge. That would be a crisis."

Author Biography

Distinguished Professor Paul Spoonley is one of New Zealand’s leading academics and a Fellow of the Royal Society Te Aparangi. He has led numerous externally funded research programmes, has written or edited 27 books and is a regular commentator in the news media. In 2010 he was a Fulbright Senior Scholar at the University of California, Berkeley, and in 2013, a Senior Visiting Fellow at the Max Planck Institute of Religious and Ethnic Diversity in Göttingen. 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 Zealand Scholarship for Exceptional Service to New Zealand Sociology. He was made a fellow of the Auckland War Memorial Museum Tamaki Paenga Hira in 2015.