Since moving overseas, I've become acutely aware of New Zealand's international reputation, and it's one to be proud of. Our national marketing campaign has been highly successful, and we're seen as a progressive, beautiful, developed nation. A paradise with strong environmental protections, a forward-thinking and happy populace, and indigenous relations that serve as an example to the world.

There's just one issue: it's almost entirely a myth.

All countries have problems, some worse than others. And to settle in a country is really to decide what compromises you're willing to make. By this measure, New Zealand's compromises aren't so bad compared to most places around the world. And any criticism of the country will quickly attract proud citizens who will remind you of this fact. This is the real Kiwi mindset. Thin-skinned and unwilling to listen to valid criticism, instead quickly deflecting with a sort of faux-objectivity. We're well known for 'tall-poppy syndrome,' a sort of defensive instinct wherein, if we see others succeeding, we quickly go to 'cut them down to size.' If that fails, we justify their success to ourselves in a way that makes them lucky, and us unlucky. When we see similar countries performing significantly better than us, we turn it into an inevitability. "They have resources that they can exploit that we simply do not," or "we're just a small island far from our trading partners; of course we're not going to be as successful," or "these problems are not unique to New Zealand," or the classic "sure, but would you really want to live there?" New Zealanders are an impossible dichotomy, at once strong and hardworking and innovative, and weak and frail and at the mercy of any old gust of the economic headwinds.

In reality, New Zealand, through decades of poor decision making, short-term thinking, and this weird insular culture that has developed, has hamstrung itself, so much so that the country's youth is emptying out into places like Australia, the US, the UK, and Canada (myself amongst that number). Under the current Act-NZ First-National government, these issues have accelerated to the point that around 200 people are leaving per day, many of them under 30.^[1] We have some of the worst child poverty rates in the developed world;^[2] some of the highest house prices relative to income;^[3] and some of the highest rates in the developed world of people leaving school without a secondary school qualification.^[4] These three factors continue to limit any efforts to make things better. Combine this with the 'island mentality,' where many people have little curiosity in the world beyond our shorelines, and where caring about anything or anyone beyond your immediate needs and family is somewhat gauche, it's little wonder that the nation is where it is.^[5]

I'd argue that the 'real New Zealand' is best portrayed not by a book, nor a film, but through Tom Scott's 2018 jazz-rap project Avantdale Bowling Club. The poverty, the isolation, the small-town circling, the promises of youth that are snuffed out, one by one, through drugs and crime. And the setting, two beautiful islands on which landlords profiteer, while politicians sell off the rest to the lowest bidder. The dysfunctional culture, in which emotion is only shown through bursts of violent anger after a night on the booze. In which cycles of poverty are encouraged to continue through social conditioning against bettering oneself. A fragile national mythos built on sports successes and fresh air. Buying and selling houses to one another. Some token Te Reo Māori, poorly pronounced and spoken out of obligation; purely pandering to win the Māori vote.

One of the more poignant verses is on Home:

Back in standard four, I walked the tracks to the mall and back
And that was like a world trip to us, back of the bus
That was like a spaceship to us, oblivious
To just how small our so-called 'big city' was
And all that gulf war shit didn't mean shit to us
We just flushed it
Kinda like the history they hushed with the musket
Kinda like the ancient Māori customs they crushed into custard squares
Like tapu in the Tupperware cupboard
With the treaty that they kaka'd on

It outlines a lot of what I've noted above. The obliviousness around New Zealand's smallness. The disinterest in the world beyond our shores. The ignorance of the historical context of the country. The disrespect to the Māori people. The refusal to engage with scars of colonialism. It's all in there.

The fabric of a country contains echoes of its founding.^[6] The United States is one of the best examples; its particular brand of rampant, unchecked capitalism has in itself the essence of slavery, alongside, of course, Protestant ideals (salvation can be found in labour). The founding mythos of explorers and conquerors has created an ideology of exceptionalism. The modern American man still believes himself a pioneer, a rebel, a visionary. But at the same time, the country is fractured. The confederacy, while short-lived, left deep scars in the superstructure. The country seems destined to be permanently polarised. Like capitalism itself, America embodies contradiction. Extreme wealth and extreme poverty. Bravery and cowardice. Power and weakness. 50 countries in a trench coat. Their near-mythological founding document, the Constitution, is held in extreme reverence and is baked into their system of law, but this reverence has created a cage around the United States. Perhaps Dan Weng, author of "Breakneck," said it best: "America is run by lawyers." The constitution created the rulebook, and the structural violence that the US enacts on its citizens is permitted due to the acceptance of the constitution as not just a legal document, but a fact of nature. It's just the way of the world.

Indeed, spectres of a nation's history continue to haunt their being, even as the populace begins forgetting their founding. Really, the nation is a hauntological project as much as anything else. In the US case, these truths have been evident for some time. John Brown, famed abolitionist, famously said:

I John Brown am now quite certain that the crimes of this guilty land will never be purged away, but with Blood.

The land itself is guilty, haunted by its crimes. Without slavery, there is no America as we know it today. It is embedded in every layer of America's being. Chattel slavery has been replaced by debt peonage. Physical violence with structural. The souls of the enslaved still haunt America.

But back to New Zealand. How does the country, as-it-is today, reflect its history? Of course, it was founded as a farming colony of Britain, producing dairy and wool for the empire. Even today, this mindset persists. The New Zealander thinks small. They see themselves still as a mere vassal state, rather than a truly sovereign nation. They are at the mercy of global headwinds, and believe themselves devoid of agency, waiting instead for marching orders from the empire. The whitewashed history I learnt in school mentioned a few conflicts (we spent the most time, it's important to note, on the 'Warring Tribes': those Māori who allied themselves with the Crown, and on the intertribal musket wars), but the overall impression we were left with was that the Māori quickly ceded sovereignty of their land, that they received great benefits in return, and that any quibbles they had with the deal were purely legalistic.

Really, this is the crux of it. New Zealand ceded its sovereignty to foreign capital in the 70s and 80s. The OPEC oil shock, followed by Muldoon's 'Think Big' projects, left the country teetering near financial collapse, and (as in the US and the UK), austerity policies were brought in under the guise of 'cleaning up the mess.' Known as Rogernomics, it transformed New Zealand's economy towards the free market. Our once strong public sector and welfare state were neutered, and our economy became misaligned with our national values. The New Zealand that we imagine ourselves to be is the New Zealand of the past. We have been sleepwalking ever since.

This is what Avantdale Bowling Club captures. The shock of reaching adulthood, and seeing your country for how it really is. It captures the tragedy of New Zealand; the wasted potential, this pervasive 'island mentality' that holds us back from greatness, and yet haunts us. Our self-subjugation. We backed away from the precipice of self-determination, instead choosing to become just another cog in the worldwide liberal world order. But there's an edge of hope too. We're stuck, misaligned with our own superstructure, but we're not finished.

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Footnotes

1. Meyer, F. (2024, August 11). Record-shattering numbers of young people leaving New Zealand. Newsroom. https://newsroom.co.nz/2024/08/12/record-shattering-numbers-of-young-people-leaving-new-zealand/ ↩

2. Bryan Perry. (2024). Child Poverty in New Zealand: The demographics of child poverty, survey-based descriptions of life 'below the line' including the use of child-specific indicators, trends in material hardship and income poverty rates for children, and international comparisons – with discussion of some of the challenges in measuring child poverty and interpreting child poverty statistics (Child Poverty in New Zealand). Ministry of Social Development. https://www.msd.govt.nz/documents/about-msd-and-our-work/publications-resources/research/child-poverty-in-nz/child-poverty-report-2024.pdf ↩

3. The current state of housing in Aotearoa New Zealand. (2025, June 17). Stats NZ. https://www.stats.govt.nz/news/the-current-state-of-housing-in-aotearoa-new-zealand/ ↩

4. Over 15%. School leavers' attainment. (2025, August). Ministry of Education - Education Counts; Ministry of Education. https://www.educationcounts.govt.nz/statistics/school-leavers ↩

5. In terms of more concrete causes, many of our modern problems can be traced back to the government of David Lange, in which finance minister Roger Douglas carried out neoliberal economic reforms (known as Rogernomics) that were more intensive than those by the Reagan administration in the United States, or the Thatcher government in the United Kingdom. These reforms hollowed out public services and the middle class, started a long road of deindustrialisation that destroyed towns, and funnelled money out of the country into foreign entities. ↩

6. This idea has been tackled by a few people. In particular, Max Weber's The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, which identified the underlying ideology of capitalism as evolving from Protestantism, attaching moral weight to the worker and production. This is also built into Marxist thought; the historical, material conditions of a nation's founding will of course affect the superstructure, namely the political system, the legal framework, and the ideology of the country (which then affects its citizens, as they grow up with these assumed beliefs). In a way, it's also just common sense. ↩