A new report on social cohesion was released on Thursday. The survey results in it are far from boring or inconsequential. Amongst screeds of important data, two big numbers stand out: 28% of New Zealanders are now in what the report calls the “alienated” camp of politics, and 44% of New Zealanders think the political system needs major change or should just be replaced.
This is all in the Helen Clark Foundation’s second annual “Social Cohesion in New Zealand” report. And this is not just a social cohesion story about loneliness, neighbourliness, or whether people feel warm about one another. It is a story about a political system losing legitimacy with a huge chunk of the country.
And not just any chunk. The people most alienated from the status quo are not the comfortable and the well-connected. They are disproportionately those under financial pressure — the poor, the struggling, the people who have been told for years that New Zealand is a ‘fair go’ society while living in a version of the country that feels anything but fair.
That matters because too much of the commentary on political distrust and disengagement gets the moral order backwards. The usual script goes like this: people are disconnecting, this is dangerous, watch out for fringe politics, misinformation, and demagogues. There is some truth in that. But it is also evasive. It treats the alienated people as the problem, rather than asking what kind of political and economic order produces this alienation in the first place.
A different reading is more useful. Instead of seeing the alienated 28% as being wrong, it makes more sense to understand that they are actually very rationally concluding that the political system isn’t working for them.
The Three New Zealands
The report surveyed 2,882 people in late 2025 — the second year of what will be an annual exercise — and found that social cohesion has declined across every dimension it measures: belonging, worth, participation, justice, acceptance. Every one. The country’s social fabric is, as the authors put it, “fraying on almost every measure.”
But the headline numbers aren’t even the important part. The report’s most significant contribution is a clustering exercise: using two full years of data across 5,513 survey responses, the researchers identified three distinct groups within New Zealand society.
Thirty percent are “Connected”: they feel they belong, trust institutions, and are broadly accepting of other New Zealanders. Forty-one percent are “Ambivalent”: the largest group, with middling belonging, middling trust, and limited community participation. They tend to be older homeowners, retirees, centre-right voters. Comfortable, but not deeply rooted.
Then there are the Alienated. Twenty-eight percent. Almost half of Māori and Pasifika respondents fall into this group. So do nearly half of Green voters and seven in ten New Zealand First voters: people who agree on almost nothing else, but share the same structural position at the outside edge of the country’s promise. As report co-author Shamubeel Eaqub put it: “We have three very different New Zealands living alongside each other.”
Former Prime Minister Helen Clark was more direct: “The size of the alienated group in the survey is quite staggering. It’s over a quarter and moving towards a third of the population. That’s a huge worry, because with alienation comes anger, comes despair. It can lash out in ways you can’t predict. It’s particularly fertile territory for populism to stir.” And she’s right about the danger. Of course, the danger isn’t that these people have lost their minds. They’ve lost faith in a system that has given them legitimate reasons to.
A “Broken NZ” report in think-tank language
The Helen Clark Foundation has essentially published a “Broken NZ” report dressed in the polite language of social science.
The authors’ headline explanation is that “financial stress is the dominant driver” of collapsing cohesion. Translated from think-tank prose: being poor in a country that presents itself as fair is eating away at the social fabric. The report’s own regression analysis confirms this — financial circumstances dominate every other variable when predicting social cohesion. Compared to someone who considers themselves prosperous, a person “just getting along” scores 6.5 points lower on the cohesion index. Someone struggling to pay bills scores 9 points lower. Someone who describes themselves as poor scores 14.4 points lower.
That is an enormous gap. And it is not a story about individual attitude problems.
The “fair go” — the national myth on which market liberalism was sold to New Zealanders from the mid-1980s onwards — is now believed by fewer than half the country. Only 45% agree that “in the long run, hard work brings a better life.” That is down seven points in a single year. Only 31% think everyone has a fair chance at getting the jobs they seek — down eight points. Only 45% think New Zealand is a land of opportunity — down six points.
Damien Venuto wrote in Stuff this week: “A generation of working New Zealanders is losing faith in the country’s core promise: that hard work leads to stability and a better life.” Venuto is describing people looking honestly at their own circumstances.
Two democracies inside one country
The report separates “prosperous respondents” from “struggling respondents,” and what it finds should be on the front page of every newspaper in the country.
The prosperous and the struggling are experiencing different political systems. They have different views on whether basic institutions of democracy are legitimate, and the gaps are staggering.
On whether elections in New Zealand are fair:
Overall: 51% agree — Prosperous: 62% — Struggling: 35%
On whether government leaders abuse their power most or all of the time:
Overall: 34% say they do — Prosperous: 27% — Struggling: 54%
On whether governments can be trusted to do the right thing:
Overall: 39% trust them — Prosperous: 56% — Struggling: 22% (A gap of 34 percentage points between rich and poor)
On whether New Zealand is a land of opportunity:
Overall: 45% agree — Prosperous: 63% — Struggling: 29%
On whether the courts make fair and impartial decisions:
Overall: 45% — Prosperous: 60% — Struggling: 33%
On whether they feel happy or very happy:
Overall: 56% — Prosperous: 79% — Struggling: 27%
On whether they feel treated with respect most or all of the time:
Overall: 75% — Prosperous: 87% — Struggling: 56%
On whether neighbours would help them:
Overall: 63% — Prosperous: 70% — Struggling: 53%
The picture is not subtle. If you are financially comfortable in this country, you mostly still believe New Zealand institutions work. Elections are fair. Courts are basically impartial. Government, on the whole, is trustworthy. Neighbours would lend you a hand if you needed it. You’re happy enough. You feel respected. You believe the deal is, in the main, upheld.
But if you are struggling, you see a very different country — one in which power is abused, courts are not impartial, and successive governments serve interests that are not yours. New Zealand as a land of opportunity is a country other people live in. Respect, happiness, a fair go — all of that is for someone else.
It is a class divide expressing itself as a legitimacy divide.
Poverty is a democratic issue, not just a welfare one. When your financial position determines whether you believe elections are fair, then the gap between the prosperous and the struggling is a gap in democratic citizenship.
Incidentally: only 12% of New Zealanders now think New Zealand’s system of government “works fine as it is,” down from 17% a year ago. One wonders which 12% think the political system is fine, but appears to be roughly the people who make it into the Koru Lounge. Meanwhile, 44% want major change or outright replacement of the political system — up six points in a year. That is a democratic legitimacy finding of the first order. The political and media class has missed this entirely.
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