The Kiwi dream isn't dead yet. But it is running out of time

Thursday, 25 June 2026

New Zealand is increasingly divided economically and socially.

Relying on past 'Kiwi resilience' is a dangerous substitute for having an actual proactive, response plan.

Actively rehearsing future economic or environmental shocks can build genuine community readiness and counter populist exploitation.

ANALYSIS: If there’s one message to take from the recent Helen Clark Foundation study on social cohesion, it’s that our relationship with money is intrinsically linked to how we feel about this country.

Is the economy doing well? Are people struggling? Does the mood feel bad right now? Does it seem like the winds are turning?

You could answer yes to all those questions. Or you could answer no. It all depends on your perspective and the circumstances of those around you.

This isn’t exclusively a local problem. I find you can always test the mood of the moment by what major pop stars are doing. They, more than anyone else, are commercially obligated to be plugged into the zeitgeist of the moment – and things aren’t looking great out there.

Charli XCX, who once gave us Brat Summer, is singing: “The world is gonna end, no hope for any of it!”

Olivia Rodrigo is singing: “It don’t matter how your love feels anymore. It’ll never be the cure.”

According to CNN, our hope of a northern-hemisphere summer banger now rests on the shoulders of 67-year-old Madonna, who has promised a new track while… wait for it… simultaneously doing promos for a credit card reward company.

It’s funny sometimes how pop culture can mimic reality.

This complete disconnect in perspectives is also playing out in the economy closer to home.

To two people living in the same world, under the same economic forces, the numbers can look, but perhaps more importantly, feel quite different.

This is why the economist Shamubeel Eaqub spoke about the emergence of three New Zealands in his Social Cohesion report for the Helen Clark Foundation, with our country increasingly divided into the connected, the ambivalent and the alienated.

As our economy struggles, tired clichés of Kiwi resilience have been thrown around. Surviving to 2025 has evolved to making it through 2026. The expectation is that our resilience is enough to carry us through this shock, and perhaps the next.

But Victoria Mulligan, the co-founder of Design Futures Aotearoa, warns that this is a dangerous assumption to make – especially when a quarter of Kiwis now sometimes go without food because they can’t afford it.

Mulligan has modelled a number of scenarios and looked at what would happen to the country if we faced another sharp economic shock (it could be an energy shock, a pandemic, an earthquake) in the context of the current makeup of our society.

In one scenario, she noted that the country might reach the point where we do start to recover again, which would lead to a great recovery.

But here’s the line that really stood out to me: “Normal was this: that the pain would be private, and the recovery would be public, and the government would call it resilience'.

Resilience isn’t a plan

What’s becoming increasingly clear is that the future wealth and comfort of New Zealanders is contingent on our ability to keep believing that this country lives up to the promise that hard work will pay off in the long term.

Relying on Kiwi resilience alone to get us through the next crisis simply won’t be enough.

A fractured society cannot sustain a thriving economy. Think about it from a purely business and economic perspective.

Economic growth requires productivity. But how can a workforce be productive when a quarter of its workers are facing food insecurity, or staying awake at night wondering how they will pay rent? Financial anxiety causes chronic stress, absenteeism, and mental health challenges, all of which act as a massive drag on business productivity.

Economic growth requires innovation and risk-taking. But risk-taking requires confidence. If young New Zealanders feel the system is rigged against them, they won't start new businesses. They won't invest in their skills. Instead, they will do what thousands are already doing: they will pack their bags and take their talents across the Tasman to Australia, exacerbating our chronic brain drain.

Mulligan’s belief is that we should prepare for future crises today to ensure we have the tools to manage the fallout when it arrives.

She wants to see scenario planning democratised and used more widely, so that we’re ready for the next economic shock.

Failing to get this right, warns Mulligan, could create fertile ground for populist politicians to stoke further divisions. We’ve already seen this in the United States, the United Kingdom and also Australia.

Mulligan wants to move scenario planning out from behind the closed doors of academic and corporate elite boardrooms and bring it directly to ordinary citizens.

This, she argues, could help ordinary Kiwis plan for those moments when unexpected shocks might hit.

You can see how this might play out on a personal level. A properly mapped out series of scenarios can better equip a person with the information they need to plan accordingly.

Where should I keep my money? What information should I trust? How do I avoid losing my wealth to a crisis? What insurance is actually necessary to protect from what might happen? How much liquidity do I need in my portfolio?

These are all questions that proper scenario planning can help to answer. This is how resilience is actually built.

It shouldn’t depend on our suffering threshold but rather on our level of preparedness.

Mulligan says we have recent evidence of this approach actually working.

Years before Covid, futurist Jane McGonigal ran future-simulation exercises where people imagined living through a respiratory pandemic.

Mulligan says McGonigal’s later research showed that the people who had already “rehearsed” that kind of disruption experienced Covid differently – with less shock, more agency, and a faster sense of what to do.

The point here is that we need to move beyond the “she’ll be right” mentality and realise that she won’t necessarily be right. All the evidence on social cohesion shows that resilience is fraying and that we are becoming increasingly vulnerable to the next shock.

The Kiwi dream of working hard for a good life isn’t dead yet, but the onus rests on us today to ensure that we put the pieces in place to maintain it in the future.

Kiwis are a resilient bunch. This much is true. But we need to start building the tools to keep that spirit alive. Resilience isn’t a given. It’s a hard-fought virtue that can be lost when people stop believing in the system.

So what’s your thought on this? What do we need to do to ensure we make it through the next shock? And how worried are you about populist politicians taking advantage of our lack of social cohesion? Let us know in the comments below.