50 Facts About Paul Spoonley

Paul Spoonley was born on 1951 and is a New Zealand sociologist and emeritus professor at Massey University where his specialist area is social change and demography and how this impacts policy decisions at the political level.

Paul Spoonley earned a Bachelor of Arts from Victoria University of Wellington in 1973, which he followed a year later with a postgraduate diploma in geography at the University of Otago.

Paul Spoonley completed a Bachelor of Education at the University of Auckland in 1979 and finally a doctorate from Massey University in 1986, with a thesis on the extreme right in New Zealand.

From 1974 to 1978, Paul Spoonley was a teaching fellow, in the Department of Sociology at the University of Auckland and a part-time lecturer at the School of Architecture and Department of Town Planning in the University of Auckland.

Paul Spoonley began lecturing at Massey University in 1979 and was the college's research director and Auckland regional director until 2013 when he became pro vice-chancellor of the university's College of Humanities and Social Sciences.

Paul Spoonley is a fellow of the Royal Society Te Aparangi, and a member of the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity.

In 2010 Paul Spoonley was a Fulbright senior scholar at the University of California, Berkeley, where he completed research on second-generation Latino identities.

Paul Spoonley said gaining a Fulbright award was "an opportunity to work with some of the best academics in the US to look at how identities evolve once immigrants are established in a new country".

In 2018 Paul Spoonley was chosen to join Jan Rath from the University of Amsterdam as co-chair of the Metropolis International Project.

Paul Spoonley explained that the project, which focused on empirical research and analysis as a "global network" had held 16 conferences since it began in 1996.

Paul Spoonley presented at the Metropolis Conference in Sydney in 2018, providing an overview of big data and how this could be visualised to understand super diversity in large cities such as Sydney, Auckland and Vancouver.

Paul Spoonley is on the International Advisory Board for Hedayah, the International Center of Excellence for Countering Violent Extremism which is based in Abu Dhabi, UAE, and a key operational part of the Global Counterterrorism Forum.

Paul Spoonley has noted the danger of racism in New Zealand in his discussions on extremism, but in 1996 was involved in a journal article that considered how this may have come about as a result of the politicization of immigration.

The Sydney Morning Herald said a study that Paul Spoonley had carried out at the same time, [cited] "racial prejudice, unemployment and Government's failure to help newcomers settle", and Paul Spoonley agreed that "New Zealand had not come up to their expectations".

Paul Spoonley later advocated for a population policy to manage immigration and find the balance between the numbers and meeting labour and skill demands, arguing that the country should set a target of net migration each year to be around one per cent of the population.

Paul Spoonley noted that there hadn't been a discussion about this since the mid-1970s, and argued that COVID-19 had highlighted how complex the situation was and the importance of having a "comprehensive and informed discussion about population change and options".

Paul Spoonley said that the challenge was for the country to adapt to a different demography, and the default response that this would be solved by immigration was unlikely to provide the solution, exacerbated by the impact of lockdowns to manage the pandemic.

Paul Spoonley confirmed this position at a presentation to the Institute of Directors in New Zealand in May 2021, with a caveat that a population policy was not just about managing immigration and the other factors needed to be taken into consideration.

Paul Spoonley did add however, that immigration is often seen just as a source of labour for New Zealand rather than a factor that has "dramatically altered" the population of the country.

Paul Spoonley has held that how well a country such as New Zealand acknowledges the significance of the transformation of the ethnic make-up of the country due to diverse immigrants, is measured by the positive identify choices immigrant families make, particularly in education, where children having a positive identity is closely related to "valued self-worth with a sense of shared identity that is further believed to promote beneficial relationships, sense of belonging and social cohesion".

In 2019 Paul Spoonley was involved in review of how the issue of social cohesion had been handled by New Zealand governments since the introduction of a cabinet paper providing indicators for assessing immigrant and host outcomes in 2005.

Right-wing populism, racism and the alt-right became an area of interest to Paul Spoonley while studying at the University of Bristol in 1976.

Paul Spoonley later reflected that when he returned to New Zealand in the 1980s, after doing his research on extreme-right group in the United Kingdom, he was told that there were no similar organisations in his home country.

Paul Spoonley later shared with RNZ that the far right in New Zealand was now more technologically sophisticated, connected to international networks and actively trying to get involved in mainstream politics.

In 2018 Paul Spoonley wrote an article about the history of the alt-right and some of the ideas behind it.

Paul Spoonley noted that the term applied to a loose coalition of "ultra-nationalists, white supremacists, neo-Nazis and anti-Semites" and first appeared in the United States in 2008, attributed to Richard B Spencer a neo-Nazi who believed in eugenics and ethnic cleansing to make the United States a white ethno-state.

Paul Spoonley noted that while public surveys such as those conducted annually by The Asia New Zealand Foundation had shown a majority of New Zealanders supported diversity and see immigration from Asia as being beneficial to the country, "extremist politics, including the extreme nationalist and white supremacist politics that appear to be at the core of this attack on Muslims, [had] been part of the New Zealand community for a long time".

Paul Spoonley was concerned at the degree that radical right-wing groups were using the internet to influence people and this came more into focus after the Christchurch mosque shootings in 2019.

Paul Spoonley commented that this was more comprehensive than anything he had previously researched and made the point it indicated that there was a "degree of sophistication, especially in relation to online far-right activities, which is new and concerning".

At the conference Paul Spoonley presented as part of a panel in a session called Addressing the causes: how can embracing community and diversity-focused approaches contribute to preventing and countering violent extremism.

Paul Spoonley noted that the research he had done in the 1970s remained relevant in 2021, despite changes such as an increase in Islamophobia and the rise of the interconnectedness New Zealand had with international extremism.

Paul Spoonley was involved in a 2020 survey that identified the three most important diversity issues in Kiwi organisations as wellbeing, gender equity and bias, and noted that the disruptions of COVID-19 had caused further challenges that needed to be solved collectively to emerge into the "new normality".

Early in the COVID-19 pandemic in New Zealand, Paul Spoonley said that the response of the New Zealand Government to immigration was still unclear and depended on what other countries did, noting measures taken in the US and Hungary as an excuse to curtail migration and take a punitive approach.

Paul Spoonley expressed a concern that while New Zealand was a very diverse country, immigrants could be adversely affected and it would depend on the resilience, networking, collaborative capabilities and resourcing of the ethnic communities to manage the situation.

Paul Spoonley however, said that the high numbers of temporary and permanent workers entering New Zealand over recent years had probably not been sustainable, put pressure on infrastructure and by being over-reliant on cheap foreign labour, had diverted a focus on developing new technology to increase productivity - a situation that Paul Spoonley said was [possibly] "preventing New Zealand preparing for an entirely different and fast-approaching future".

Paul Spoonley said it was important to acknowledge the number of New Zealanders returning to their home country during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Paul Spoonley had concerns that political rhetoric could damage the reputation of New Zealand as a country that was welcoming and tolerant.

Paul Spoonley said that immigrants have contributed considerably to New Zealand society and that in spite of some challenges, immigrant communities were now getting large enough to sustain businesses.

Paul Spoonley has said that Maori as tangata whenua of New Zealand could be more involved in policymaking in immigration and take an obvious role in welcoming immigrants to New Zealand, giving the example of how a Maori tribe Ngati Whatua ki Kaipara had engaged with Chinese immigrants, teaching them te reo Maori, waiata and haka.

In 2022, Paul Spoonley told Kathryn Ryan on RNZ that while generally around the world, COVID-19 had seen a drop in life expectancy, in New Zealand there had been an increase of around eight months.

Paul Spoonley suggested this was likely to be due to "a combination of the relatively low number of Covid-19 deaths at the start of the pandemic and the restrictions brought in which reduced other deaths".

Paul Spoonley said birth rates initially slowed during COVID-19 due to people being unsure about their jobs or anxious about bringing children into a world dealing with a pandemic, noting that in 2020 New Zealand had its lowest birth rate since the 1980s.

Paul Spoonley said that during the 1990s and early 2020s this population growth rate was the highest of any OECD country, maintaining that although it had reduced early in COVID-19, it remained important for policymakers to remember that two-thirds of population growth came from migration and measures to manage this needed to look at the capacity of New Zealand to absorb migrants without putting infrastructure under pressure.

Paul Spoonley questioned whether the immigration policies of New Zealand were "fit for purpose", suggesting they needed to consider an international labour shortage and the impact that the measures taken to address the pandemic had on immigrant communities, particularly in how families became divided.

Paul Spoonley suggested that post-COVID New Zealand accepted a net population loss and develop initiatives to attract and hold migrants.

Paul Spoonley acknowledged New Zealand struggled to be competitive internationally with wages, but concluded that "migrants tend to come to NZ because of life style, education and safety of the country", and the challenge was to have the capacity to process applications.

Paul Spoonley responded that while there were high levels of compliance during the pandemic which showed some social cohesion, discussing this with a bottom-up approach was necessary and working with local communities, particularly Maori and Pasifika was crucial in achieving genuinely cohesive outcomes.

Paul Spoonley had earlier said that changes in New Zealand's way of life after COVID would "not be determined by protesters", but by the way the majority of people adjust to use of leisure time, travelling and dining out, with less dependence on tourism.

Paul Spoonley noted the anti-government movement that had become very visible in New Zealand was "going to be a faultline in terms of our politics for some time" and coupled with airports being major sources of infection, meant there would be "biosecurity or medical biosecurity risks inherent in international travel".

Paul Spoonley was a recipient of the New Zealand 1990 Commemoration Medal in 1990.