A global wave of disillusionment and disenfranchisement has not spared New Zealand, with a majority of respondents to a survey here agreeing that New Zealand society is broken and the country is in decline.

Ipsos New Zealand asked 1001 Kiwis about their hopes for the future and their views of the state of the nation in the final week of February. The results, exclusively obtained by Newsroom, line up with the pollster’s findings from 28 countries overseas: People believe the economy is rigged to benefit the rich and powerful and traditional politicians aren’t doing anything about it.

Three in five respondents told Ipsos that New Zealand society was in decline and that the country is broken, aligning closely with results from overseas. This is the first time New Zealand has been included in this survey, which Ipsos has run elsewhere five times since 2016.

Paul Spoonley, the former director of centre of research excellence He Whenua Taurikura, said the findings align with the long-running Edelman Trust Barometer study, which doesn’t include New Zealand.

“What they’re recording internationally, which is repeated in this Ipsos survey, is a very rapid decline in trust, particularly in governments and in experts, and a decline in the level of social cohesion internationally,” he said.

“What you see repeated in both the Edelman Trust Barometer and the Ipsos survey is this dissatisfaction, but more than that, distrust of leaders, within government or out. Attached to that distrust is a post-Covid pessimism in the collective.”

Ipsos has run the survey overseas in order to detect trends of populism. It asks a number of questions as part of two indices, one about perceptions that the system is broken and one about populism specifically.

For the broken system index, the pollster asks whether people agree with statements like “traditional parties and politicians don’t care about people like me” and “experts in this country don’t understand the lives of people like me”. A majority of New Zealand respondents backed these statements, as well as expressing desire for a “strong leader” to either “take the country back from the rich and powerful” or “break the rules” to get things done.

Then there are the more outrightly populist statements. Here, Ipsos asks whether people agree that “the main divide in our society is between ordinary citizens and the political and economic elite”, whether that elite cares about “hard-working people” and whether the most important political issues should be decided through referendums.

For these statements, a majority of New Zealanders also supported them, again in line with the global average.

Some of our comparator countries, like Australia and Canada, were generally less likely to agree with these statements than New Zealand respondents. Others, like the United Kingdom, were even more pessimistic about the state of affairs in their nations.

Spoonley said that while the term “populism” often carries connotations of a right-wing political movement, that isn’t necessarily what these results are talking about.

“Both right and left are unhappy with government at the moment. It’s labelled as populism here, which tends to suggest a centre-right aversion to government, but there is also an aversion from the left at the moment which I’m not sure I would label as populist,” he said.

Ipsos NZ ran this survey alongside its regular Issues Monitor, which asks about voter history. It found that supporters of the parties currently in Opposition were more likely to agree with most of the broken system statements, while supporters of the Government were more likely to desire a “strong leader willing to break the rules”.

There was, however, no political divide among people saying society is broken and the country is in decline.

Right and left were also equally represented in the one area where New Zealand notably differed from the rest of the world: Views on immigration. Respondents here were marginally less likely to say that employers should prioritise hiring New Zealanders over immigrants when jobs are scarce and significantly less likely than the global average to agree that New Zealand would be stronger if it stopped immigration or that immigrants take jobs from “real” citizens.

“We asked exactly the same questions back in the early 2000s in relation to immigration. When we asked questions about taking away jobs from New Zealanders, the percentage agree/disagree is not very different from the Ipsos figures,” he said.

The people most likely to agree with the statements around a broken system and populism were Māori, low-income workers and young people, Ipsos reported.

“It hints at an underlying disconnect of some groups and some communities in our society, and the way in which they’re perceiving the political elite,” Spoonley said.

While this is the first time Ipsos has asked these questions in New Zealand, other research into attitudes around social cohesion issues has been carried out in the past.

Koi Tū: The Centre for Informed Futures at the University of Auckland has published three reports on social cohesion in recent years, with the first landing during the very early days of the Covid-19 response in May 2020.

“It showed very high levels of social cohesion and I think that social cohesion continued right the way through to the general election and you saw it in the election results,” Spoonley, who helped with that work, said.

“That unravelled, quite spectacularly, in 2021 and 2022. If we jump to the 2023 report, what we found is those high levels of social cohesion and I would suggest trust, particularly trust in government, had literally evaporated over the previous two years. The key indicator of that was the protests that were occurring around New Zealand, most notably in Wellington.”

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