A new tranche of data released from last year’s Census paints a fresh snapshot of life in New Zealand and how the way Kiwis live has changed in the past six years.
The Census takes place every five years with New Zealanders last questioned in March 2023.
Stats NZ released more information from last year’s survey this morning, which includes anonymised information on housing, transport, and demographic information — such as ethnicity, sexuality and religion.
A new tranche of data paints a fresh snapshot of life in New Zealand. (Source: 1News)
Number of reo speakers grows 15%
More than 200,000 New Zealanders now speak te reo Māori.
After English, the most widely spoken language in New Zealand was te reo.
There were 213,849 te reo Māori speakers in 2023, up from 185,955 in 2018.
This was an increase of 15% over three years.
The Gisborne and Northland regions had the highest proportion of te reo Māori speakers, at 16.9% and 10.1%. These regions also had the largest proportions of Māori ethnic populations, at 54.8 and 37.4% respectively.
New Zealanders are now majority non-religious
More than half of Kiwis now report having no religion — for the first time since the New Zealand census began to collect the data.
The proportion of people with “no religion” has steadily increased from 41.9% 10 years ago, to 48.2% in 2018, and 51.6% in 2023.
The three largest religious groupings were Christian, Hindu and Islam.
Homeownership increases in ‘small’ reversal of trend
Around 66% of households now own their home or hold it in a family trust, compared with 64.5% in 2018. The “small” increase was a reversal of the falling rates seen since homeownership peaked in the early 1990s, according to Stats NZ.
Auckland had the lowest rate of home ownership of all the regions, at 59.5%, which was largely unchanged from the 2018 rate of 59.4%. Home ownership rates increased in all other regions, with the highest rate recorded by the Tasman region.
It came as median rent grew by nearly a third since 2018.
Census data suggested housing quality was also improving with legislative change around healthy homes tightening standards for rental housing, Stats NZ said.
There was a substantial increase in the use of energy-efficient heating with 66.8% of dwellings owning heat pumps compared with 47.3% in 2018.
In 2023, 18.1% of privately-occupied dwellings experienced dampness at least some of the time, compared with 21.5% in 2018, according to nationwide data.
Gisborne was the only region to experience an increase in dampness and mould in homes, following last year’s devastating Cyclone Gabrielle, with almost one in three homes in the region experiencing dampness at the time of the census.
Wellington has highest proportion of LGBTIQ+ community
The 2023 Census was the first census to collect data from New Zealanders about their gender, sexual identity, and whether they have a variation of sex characteristics.
About 4.9% or one in 20 Kiwis identified as belonging to the Rainbow community in the data. Of that group, the highest proportion lived in Wellington city, at 11.3%.
After Wellington, the cities with the highest proportions were Dunedin (7.3%), Christchurch (6.0%), Palmerston North (5.8%), and Hamilton (5.6%).
Auckland had 57,324 people who belonged to the LGBTIQ+ population (4.9%), with the highest proportion in the Waitematā local board.
Work from home grows dramatically
Following the pandemic, the number of people mostly working from home has increased by almost 60% between 2018 and 2023.
Last year, people who worked mostly from home made up 17.7% (464,130 people) of the employed adult population compared with 11.9% in 2018 (291,234 people).
The Wellington and Auckland regions had the highest growth since 2018 in people who mostly worked from home, with the number in both regions more than doubling.
In 2023, 158,658 people mostly worked from home in the Auckland region, up from 72,099 people in 2018, while Wellington went from 24,909 people to 56,016 people.
Over 350,000 people affiliate with three large iwi
For people of Māori descent, who had an iwi affiliation (953,673 people), the three largest iwi were: Ngāpuhi with 184,470 people (19.3%), Ngāti Porou with 102,480 people (10.7%), and Ngāi Tahu/Kāi Tahu with 84,969 people (8.9%).
The official population counts for tribes across the country have been collated for the first time in a decade. (Source: 1News)
People could record that they affiliated with up to 16 iwi. In last year’s Census, 15.3% of people of Māori descent (146,205 people) did not know their iwi.
Data released last month revealed all iwi affiliation populations had increased by an average of 46% between the 2013 and 2023 Census.
Regular cigarette smoking rate halves
Cigarette smoking also continued to decrease from the rates reported in 2018.
The proportion of the adult population, who smoked one or more cigarettes a day almost halved since the 2013 Census. In 2023, 7.7% of the population (310,809 people) were regular smokers compared with 15.1% (463,194 people) in 2013.
Tasman had the lowest proportion of regular smokers at 6.3%, while Gisborne had the highest proportion of regular smokers at 12.0%.
Northland had the highest proportion of ex-smokers at 32.8% and Auckland had the highest proportion of adults who had never smoked regularly, at 73.6%.
