Dominion Post, P1, May 20 2008
Dominion Post, P1, May 20 2008
A new study has revealed that if you give a lot of money to a flaky Massey University research project, release the results to a bunch of semi-conscious journalists who are having a slack news night at the Dominion Post, then add a dramatic front-page headline written by a Qantas Award winner for headline-writing, you get something that reinforces racist, xenophobic social stereotypes and helps absolutely nobody.

On the other hand, GoG’s new research is irrefutable. Taking Dr Greg Clydesdale’s report on Pacific Islanders in New Zealand, which is part of a three-year study called “Growing Pains, Evaluations and the Cost of Human Capital” and headlined in the DomPost, our internationally acclaimed researchers made two key initial findings:

- The three-year study’s title is baffling and meaningless and

- Clydesdale’s report, as described by the DomPost, is virtually worthless

Then our scrutineers delved deeper into the Doc’s reported findings, which will be presented at an international conference in Brazil, where nuts are an important industry and where Clydesdale’s shock revelations will hopefully be left to moulder, creating useful compost.

Before presenting our expert team’s findings, let’s summarise the Dominion Post’s article about the Clydesdale report. It says that Polynesians pose a threat to New Zealand economic growth because there are too many of them; they are too fertile and therefore breed lots of new Pacific Islanders; they are useless in school; they do not start enough new businesses; they are not sufficiently productive (except between the sheets); and they are over-represented in crime statistics.

Taking Dr Clydesdale’s basic statistics, we discovered that 93.1 percent of New Zealand’s 3,854,695 population (measured in 2007) are not Polynesian. We know that 265,974 (6.9 percent) are. Of these, only 9100 Pacific Islanders (or 8 percent) were convicted of an offence in 2006 – ranging from littering the streets to perhaps the odd murder. Who knows? Clydesdale makes the remarkable claim that this number (1.1 percent more than Islanders’ proportion of the total population) makes them over-represented in crime figures.

Our research found that Dr Clydesdale had not researched the typical offences committed by Pacific Islanders by age group or socio-economic category, but by taking a Clydesdale-clod-hopping shot in the dark, we concluded they mostly consisted of petty crimes of theft and violence caused by ignorance, poverty and deprivation – although it must be stressed that this is pure conjecture (rather like much of Dr Clydesdale’s conclusions).

We learned that, overall, Pacific Islanders convicted during the study period made up 0.23 percent of the entire population. This means that 99.77 percent of the other people in this country are either offenders, or innocent, or a substantial proportion of some other group unconnected with Pacific Islanders must be committing most of the crime as well as (like those hopeless Polynesians) failing to come up with the software solutions that could bring untold riches to our shores. Who could that group consist of, we wondered?

The preliminary answer is that, in 2004 for example, a staggering 43 percent of criminal convictions were earned by the minority Maori population which in 2006 was measured at 565,326 – more than double the population of Pacific Islanders who couldn’t come close in criminal terms, with Islanders accounting for 9 percent and 45 percent by NZ Europeans, who overwhelmingly outnumber both of the other ethnic groups.

Our team looked in vain at the Dominion Post’s report for an answer to these pressing issues. All we found of interest was Clydesdale’s claim that all these Pacific Island under-achievers would produce “a large proportion of the population without the educational requirements to create [new products and production processes].”

Independently, we found that much of young Pacific Islanders’ poor academic performance can be attributed to a low starting base. Their immigrant parents tend to gather in urban groups for support and, lacking skills, tend also to do the dirty jobs that white high achievers gave up long ago. The children also – like white children – have trouble in becoming bi-lingual and therefore lag behind.

It is possible (nay, quite likely) that the Dominion Post omitted some important details that could justify Clydesdale’s findings. If not, our team recommends that the Massey boffin’s research be placed in a dustbin that might well be emptied by a poorly paid Pacific Islander, along with the fish and chip wrappings that were yesterday’s newspaper.