The March 15th terrorist attack started a national dialogue about prejudice in New Zealand. Previous research has investigated attitudes towards Muslims in comparison to ethnic minorities. However, presently, there are no nationally representative studies in New Zealand systematically comparing attitudes to Muslims with attitudes to other religious groups. Here, we present evidence from the New Zealand edition of the International Social Survey Programme module on religion, a national postal survey ( N = 1335) collected between September 2018 and February 2019. We assess perceived threat and negativity towards Christians, Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, Jews, and Atheists. We find substantially greater perceived threat and negativity towards Muslims compared with other groups. In particular, older people, New Zealand Europeans, men, and those with more right‐wing attitudes report greater threat and negativity towards Muslims. In line with previous studies, higher religious identification and higher education predict greater acceptance. Taken collectively, these results reveal that the Muslim Acceptance Gap in this country is substantial, and greater challenges for acceptance are evident among lower‐educated, right‐wing, older, secular, and male populations. The magnitude of this gap reveals a substantial challenge to the future of New Zealand where religious and secular people can live without evoking prejudice.

Quality survey research relies on the willingness of the public to participate, but survey response rates are decreasing over time. This research note explores response rate data from several national probability sample mail surveys drawn from a consistent sampling frame (the New Zealand electoral roll) over the past 30 years. The aim of this work is to document the scale of the response rate decline problem in mail survey studies, predict future response rates, and track nonresponse bias through comparing self-reported voter turnout in surveys to official turnout. We use data from the New Zealand Election Study, the International Social Survey Programme, the New Zealand edition of the World Values Survey, and the New Zealand Attitudes and Values Study. Our findings demonstrate that there has been a consistent downward trend in response rates and an increase in nonresponse bias for self-reported voter turnout. Response rates in the early 1990s were as high as 72%, before dropping to the 60% range around the year 2000, with response rates effectively halving from their early 1990s rates by 2015. We comment on the implications for future surveys, voter enrolment, local government turnout, and political polling. Ultimately, these results leave us with the question of how long traditional mail survey research will be able to continue.

The COVID-19 pandemic intensified anxieties among temporary workers in New Zealand tertiary education, particularly those affiliated with universities reliant on the lucrative market for international fee-paying students. As national borders closed and states started looking inward, these same learning institutions began to more visibly express the language of market logics for which they had been remodeled in recent decades, adapting to declining revenue through austerity-like budget cuts. The communication of these cuts to the academic precariat has been mixed, with some institutions resorting to cold, forceful determinations delivered as matter-of-fact restructurings, while others have preferred an oblique recasting of the pandemic's disruption as an opportunity for social responsibility. This paper is a collective self-reflection on the activism undertaken by the newly formed Tertiary Education Action Group Aotearoa during the COVID-19 pandemic. It begins by contextualizing the reforms rolled out in response to the pandemic in relation to the “neoliberal turn” of higher education and examines how career pathways for early career academics have transformed into a continuous cycle of precarious employment. We argue that the idealized “early career” identity has been lost and that through a process of mourning we can regather ourselves and embrace our lived realities as members of the academic precariat. We detail how the pandemic acted as a catalyst for this “productive mourning” and enabled us to begin mobilizing discontent among the academic precariat. Finally, we reflect on the extent to which we were able to challenge existing structures that are responsible for the exploitative nature of precarious academic work.

Despite the growing size of the academic precariat in the tertiary sector, this exploited group of workers lacks a voice in either their universities or their national union. In this article we draw on our experiences of transitioning from a small activist group to a broader research collective with influence and voice, while forging networks of solidarity. Through reflecting on developing the Precarious Academic Work Survey (PAWS), we explore how action research is a viable way of structurally and politically (re)organising academic work. We argue that partnering with changemakers such as unions as co-researchers disrupts their embedded processes so that they may be (re)politicised towards pressing issues such as precarity. Further, we highlight how research can be used as a call to action and a tool to recruit powerful allies to collaborate on transforming universities into educational utopias.

This article considers the role of lawyers and immigration advisers in the deportation process for non-resident visa holders in New Zealand. In the process, this article adds to a small but growing literature on the role of immigration officials in the immigration policy space. We use Lipsky’s concept of the street-level bureaucrat and Lakhani’s notion of ‘para-state’ actors—those outside the formal apparatus of the state who nonetheless serve a central role in policy implementation—to advance our understanding of the deportation process. This qualitative study engaged in in-depth interviews with twenty-two (22) immigration lawyers and advisers to explore their experiences. We identify several themes about the importance of formal and informal networks for developing advocacy skills and tactics; how the features of the immigration system, lower levels of judicial scrutiny of decisions, and lower evidentiary requirements create spaces for lawyer advocacy and creativity; and how participants shared a commitment to social justice and camaraderie in their work that was essential to interactions with state officials and others. We contend that these efforts have the potential to reshape the state’s bordering practices yet are an often-overlooked area of study.