New Zealand’s sense of social cohesion is eroding under financial stress, report says
Thursday, 23 April 2026
People’s sense of social cohesion and trust in government has slipped on almost every score since a year ago, according to the Helen Clark Foundation’s second report on social cohesion in New Zealand.
And the strongest explanation is increased financial stress.
“The biggest predictor for people's sense of belonging, their isolation, loneliness, or their trust in each other, trust in community, goes back to that one indicator around ‘are you financially stressed?’,” said the report’s author Shamubeel Eaqub.
All told, just 34% felt satisfied, or very satisfied with their financial lives, and 42% were dissatisfied, or very dissatisfied, according to data in the report, published on Thursday.
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Money struggles were isolating, said Eaqub.
“When you’re financially stressed, you’re really focused on that stress alone. You don’t have the same level of participation as a result you don’t have a sense of belonging, which then spirals into even more isolation.”
“I think the link is pretty clear,” he said.
“The harder economic conditions I think have really affected a lot of people really badly.”
Financial stress, political alliance, institutional distrust, and social isolation reinforced each other, he said. They produced a population that was frustrated and disconnected from the conventional institutions we rely on for collective decision-making.
Financial stress also undermined people’s sense of self-worth and their sense of how just their society was.
“There’s a sense of shame, of feeling like you are failing, and so it’s hard to reach out to people because, in the current environment, it feels like everything is conditioned on us talking about all the amazing things that are happening with ourselves,” Eaqub said.
There were, he concluded, three New Zealands: the “connected” 30%, the “ambivalent” 41%, and the “alienated” 28% (the numbers are rounded, and so do not add up to 100%).
Those in the alienated group contained people from very diverse voting blocks.
“Almost half of Māori and Pasifika are in this group [alienated],” Eaqub wrote in the report. “So are nearly half of Green voters, and seven in ten New Zealand First voters.”
And, he said: “They are the loudest voices in our public conversation, and the ones most likely to feel the country is not for them.”
There were other factors that had come into play, the report said. Trust in government peaked in 2020. Homeowners had greater levels of civic participation than renters. Heavy social media users appeared to be more isolated, but other factors like age made it hard to draw a causal link.
The report asked for people’s subjective opinions. There was however, a clear indication that when answering, people did not always tell the truth.
When asked about their civic engagement, many respondents lied with 80% claiming to have voted in the last general election, and 70% in their last local council election.
Government data shows a little under 70% of eligible people voted in the last general election, and just 29% of people who were enrolled to vote in the last Auckland Council elections bothered to cast their ballot.
Eaqub said: “The reliability is not so much that you know are they telling the truth. It's more around what is the feeling that people have that affects their sense of belonging, their sense of isolation, their sense of trust.”
He said: “We’re not trying to kind of benchmark whether people really vote. What we’re trying to benchmark is how people perceive themselves and perceive themselves within the context of the community.”
But could there have been similar lying about social cohesion, with some people giving answers they felt would impress the researchers, or signal virtues such as social empathy for others who might be struggling?
Eaqub said attitudinal surveys always suffered from these kinds of issues. However, he said this particular survey was designed off the back of a similar Australian survey. It benchmarked New Zealand against Australia, so even if biases existed, it should still let New Zealand see how socially cohesive it was compared with the country Kiwis like to compare themselves with most.
And, on that front, the news was bad.
“Australians are happier (79% vs 56%), more connected to their neighbourhoods (82% vs 63% say neighbours would help), and far more likely to participate in social or religious groups (41% vs 27%),” Eaqub said.
Their direction of travel towards less social cohesion was the same as New Zealand’s, but Australia was richer, and starting from higher engagement.
Eaqub felt New Zealand was so socially divided that it was incapable of coming up with a consensus on policies to improve social cohesion.
This “tribal” division led to a flip-flopping government that struggled to make progress with right-leaning, and left-leaning governments, reversing the course of their predecessors on key policy areas like tax and welfare when they won power.
“We’ve got these diametrically opposed attitudes to what needs to happen, and so it becomes tribal,” Eaqub said. “If you can’t find a middle ground, that common ground to create policy, then all you get is the chop and change.”
New Zealand social cohesion in 10 charts
Data collected by the Helen Clark Foundation suggests New Zealanders enjoy diverse friendships, very mixed financial lives, are frustrated by wealth inequalities, and that many doubt New Zealand is a land of opportunity any more.