Paul Spoonley

Paul Spoonley (born 1951) is a New Zealand sociologist and emeritus professor at Massey University where his specialist area is social change and demography and how this impacts policy decisions at the political level.

Spoonley has led numerous externally funded research programmes, written or edited twenty-seven books and is a regular commentator in the news media.

He noted that there hadn't been a discussion about this since the mid-1970s, and argued that COVID-19 had highlighted how complex the situation was and the importance of having a "comprehensive and informed discussion about population change and options".

Spoonley earned a Bachelor of Arts from Victoria University of Wellington in 1973, which he followed a year later with a postgraduate diploma in geography at the University of Otago.

From 1974 to 1978, Spoonley was a teaching fellow, in the Department of Sociology at the University of Auckland and a part-time lecturer at the School of Architecture and Department of Town Planning in the University of Auckland.

In 1976 he obtained a Master of Arts again from Otago, studying Niuean migrants, and then a Master of Science from the University of Bristol in 1978.

He completed a Bachelor of Education at the University of Auckland in 1979 and finally a doctorate from Massey University in 1986, with a thesis on the extreme right in New Zealand.

He began lecturing at Massey University in 1979 and was the college's research director and Auckland regional director until 2013 when he became pro vice-chancellor of the university's College of Humanities and Social Sciences.

He is a fellow of the Royal Society Te Apārangi, and a member of the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity.

He explained that the project, which focused on empirical research and analysis as a "global network" had held 16 conferences since it began in 1996.

The position of the project: 'that successful societies will be those that explicitly manage [migration and diversity] for the mutual benefit of their citizens, their migrants and their minority communities', was said by Spoonley to be "in equal parts, exciting and challenging...[because]...immigration and diversity are issues that have their fair share of tensions and anxieties. Metropolis is at the core of these debates internationally".

Spoonley has noted the danger of racism in New Zealand in his discussions on extremism, but in 1996 was involved in a journal article that considered how this may have come about as a result of the politicization of immigration.

It involved an examination of statements made by Winston Peters during the campaign for the 1996 New Zealand general election which were seen as racialising immigrants and got a response from the Office of the Race Relations Conciliator with which Spoonley had an involvement that allowed him to observe some of the discussion around this issue.

The authors of the journal article took the position that 'race' was not an "inherent biological fact, but instead...the product of social relations of domination and exploitation".

The article backgrounded the geopolitical situation in New Zealand at the time as being partly influenced by an alignment with the economies of Asia which had resulted in increased immigration from East Asia into the country.

These immigrants were often portrayed negatively in the media, with some examples of public hostility, but the article held that "the politics of exclusion gained its most obvious expression during [the] election year through the comments of Winston Peters".

The Sydney Morning Herald said a study that Spoonley had carried out at the same time, [cited] "racial prejudice, unemployment and Government's failure to help newcomers settle", and Spoonley agreed that "New Zealand had not come up to their expectations".

In the newspaper article, Spoonley gave examples of racism against Asian children and noted that "migrants found New Zealanders friendly on a personal level but were puzzled and threatened by racist public comments".

Peters denied the accusations, but the Race Relations Conciliator said that the situation in the community around this issue was "quite precarious" and there were "danger signals" that needed to be addressed.

Spoonley later advocated for a population policy to manage immigration and find the balance between the numbers and meeting labour and skill demands, arguing that the country should set a target of net migration each year to be around one per cent of the population.

Other issues identified included a dropping fertility rate and an ageing population in New Zealand, deficits in infrastructure and how temporary work visas were managed in terms of a possible transition to permanent residency.

There was also the need to address how immigrants were viewed by the local population, build awareness of the value of diversity and social inclusion and deal with extremism that created anxiety through such things as hate speech and xenophobia.

In 2010 Spoonley was a Fulbright senior scholar at the University of California, Berkeley, where he completed research on second-generation Latino identities.

He said gaining a Fulbright award was "an opportunity to work with some of the best academics in the US to look at how identities evolve once immigrants are established in a new country".

In 2018 Spoonley was chosen to join Jan Rath from the University of Amsterdam as co-chair of the Metropolis International Project.

Spoonley presented at the Metropolis Conference in Sydney in 2018, providing an overview of big data and how this could be visualised to understand super diversity in large cities such as Sydney, Auckland and Vancouver.

After the presentation, there were "interactive workshops [which] introduced and taught participants to use cutting-edge data visualisation tools to explore, analyse, interpret and display big data on various dimensions of metropolitan super-diversity".

Noted as "one of New Zealand's leading academics in social change and demography", Spoonley is a member of a panel of experts on a project entitled Understanding Policing Delivery to evaluate Policing in various New Zealand communities, specifically whether there is fairness in "planning, working and service delivery".

On the New Zealand Police website it was further explained that the focus of the programme was on "identifying whether, where, and to what extent, bias exists at a system level in Police’s operating environment...[and]...its members bring together a diverse range of skills and experience, to ensure the research, analysis, and advice is informed by a holistic range of views and perspectives, particularly understanding and applying a tikanga Māori view".

The project is a collaboration with University of Waikato and Te Puna Haumaru New Zealand Institute of Security and Crime Science, and Devon Polaschek welcomed the appointment of the panel and the "diverse range of expertise and experience they bring to this complex issue".

Spoonley is on the International Advisory Board (IAB) for Hedayah, the International Center of Excellence for Countering Violent Extremism which is based in Abu Dhabi, UAE, and a key operational part of the Global Counterterrorism Forum.

The role of the IAB is to advise the Steering Board and Hedayah's leadership team.

Educated both in New Zealand and England, his work on racism, immigration and ethnicity is widely discussed in the wake of the Christchurch mosque shootings (2019) and the COVID-19 pandemic.

In 2019, he stepped down from his position as pro vice-chancellor at Massey University and has reverted to a position as a research professor in the college to allow him to re-focus on writing and research.

In 2021 he was made distinguished emeritus professor in recognition of "his extensive contribution to both academia and Massey University".

In early June 2022, Spoonley, along with fellow sociologist Professor Joanna Kidman, was appointed as a co-director of the newly established Centre of Research Excellence for Preventing and Countering Violent Extremism.

The research centre was established in line with the recommendations of the Royal Commission of Inquiry report into the Christchurch mosque shootings.

Its main purpose is to sponsor research and scholarships into countering terrorism and extremism.

On 15 October 2019, Spoonley in an opinion piece, responding to The Christchurch Call, an "attempt to seek international co-operation, involving both the major online platforms and other countries and agencies, to monitor and act against extreme racist content and violence in cyberspace", noted that a meeting to discuss violent extremism jointly hosted by Hedayah and Deakin University in Melbourne, concluded the extreme right had platforms of social media at the time that were independent of others such as Facebook and could circulate their ideology without being "subject to moderation and regulation".

Spoonley in August 2020 predicted that by 2030 the population of the New Zealand would be older, and this would result in what he called "sub-replacement fertility" that was likely to drop further due to COVID-19.