“It looks like New Zealand looks,” said Jennifer Curtin, a professor of politics and director of the Public Policy Institute at the University of Auckland, of the country’s government. “We’re not male, pale and stale anymore.”
Here’s what New Zealand’s new Parliament looks like
New Zealand already had a relatively diverse Parliament. Following the 2017 election,
38% of New Zealand’s MPs were women — a record in the country. Now it’s 48%.
The proportion of openly LGBTQ lawmakers has also increased from 7% to 11%.
Māori representation has slipped, however, from 23% at the last election to 21%. That’s the lowest level of Māori representation
since 2014, but it is still higher than the total proportion of people who identify as Māori in the general population — around 17%.
Diversity in the New Zealand Parliament
New Zealand’s Parliament has had Māori seats since 1867, soon after the country was founded, but these have sometimes been seen as tokenism. Until
1967, Māori candidates were only allowed to contest a limited number of Māori seats, and it was only in
1975 that Māori were able to choose whether they wanted to be on the Māori electoral roll.
Kelvin Davis, who is Māori and the deputy leader of Ardern’s center-left Labour Party, said he was happy with the level of Indigenous representation in New Zealand’s Cabinet. “I think (the level of representation in Cabinet) is a first ever and we’re proud to be a part of that,”
he said, according to public broadcaster Radio New Zealand (RNZ).
Labour MP Louisa Wall, who is Māori and lesbian, says that the increase in LGBTQ representation will create an even more progressive society. New Zealand introduced same-sex civil
unions in 2004, and in 2013, Wall
spearheaded a bill to make same-sex marriage legal.
“We have come a long way and for me it is about representative democracy. We reflect our larger New Zealand population,” Wall
said, according to RNZ.
Curtin said that having a representative legislature meant there was a range of perspectives at the decision table. “Diversity in itself is good,” she said. “Anything that disrupts the homogeneity and the dominance of the White majority, or the colonizers, of this place.”
Here’s how that stacks up globally
Out of thousands of active lawmakers across the globe, just 194 are openly gay in 42 countries, according to data collated by Andrew Reynolds, from the School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University.
Of those countries, New Zealand now has the highest proportion of openly LGBTQ lawmakers, at 11%, according to his data. (Previously it was the United Kingdom, at 8%.)
In New Zealand, 3.5% of adults identified as gay, lesbian, bisexual or another sexual identity other than straight, according to a 2018 Statistics New Zealand survey of approximately 12,000 households. The surveyors, however, said the result “
may underestimate” the true proportion as the data was collected via face-to-face interviews.
When it comes to gender New Zealand doesn’t have the highest proportion of women lawmakers in the world — that title goes to Rwanda, where
61% of seats in the country’s lower house are occupied by women. The country lost so many men during the
1994 genocide that women stepped in to fill key leadership roles.
But New Zealand’s 48% female legislature is the highest of all OECD countries, alongside Mexico (where a
2014 law dictates gender parity in politics), and well above the global average of
25%.
New Zealand’s closest neighbor, Australia, only has 31% female representation in its lower house, while Pacific Island countries have an average of 6%.
When it comes to the overall population, there are
slightly more women than men in New Zealand — globally there are slightly more men than women, according to the
CIA World Factbook.
As for ethnic diversity, the country is still lacking when it comes to representation of Asian New Zealanders, for example, who make up 15% of the country’s general population, but only hold 7% of seats in Parliament.
But demographer Paul Spoonley, a professor at Massey University in Auckland, said a parliament didn’t need to perfectly match the overall makeup of the general population to be representative — although warned if it was too different the public might lose trust in their lawmakers.
“I think it’s really important that a political system represents the diversity including the ethnic diversity of a population, and that’s because they bring that voice and experience,” he said.
