New Caledonia’s population has shrunk to 264,596 over the past six years, the latest census, conducted in April and May 2025, has revealed.

This compares to the previous census, conducted in 2019, which recorded a population of 271,400 in the French Pacific territory.

To explain the population drop of almost seven thousand (6811), Jean Philippe Grouthier, Census Chef de Mission at the French national statistical institute INSEE, said that even though the population natural balance (the difference between births and deaths during the period) was more than 11,000, the net migration balance showed a deficit of 18,000.

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In terms of permanent departures and arrivals, earlier informal studies (based on the international Nouméa-La Tontouta airport traffic figures) already hinted at a sharp increase in residents leaving New Caledonia for good, after the destructive and deadly riots that erupted in May 2014, causing 14 dead and over 2 billion euros (NZ$3.8 billion) in damages.

The census was originally scheduled to take place in 2024, but had to be postponed due to the civil unrest.

“New Caledonia is probably less attractive than it could have been in the 2000s and 2010s years,” Grouthier told local media yesterday.

However, he stressed that the downward trend was already there at the previous 2019 census.

‘Not entirely due to riots’
During the 2014-2019 period, a net balance of around then 1000 residents had already left New Caledonia.

“It’s not as if it was something that would be entirely due to the May 2024 riots,” he said.

At the provincial level, New Caledonia’s most populated region (194,978), the Southern Province, which makes up three quarters of the population, has registered the sharpest drop (about four percent).

Meanwhile, the other two provinces (North, Loyalty Islands) have slightly gained in population over the same period, respectively +2.1 (50,947) and +1.7 percent (18,671).

The preliminary figures released yesterday are now to be processed and analysed in detail, before public release, ISEE said.

The latest population statistics are regarded as essential in order to serve as the basis for further calculation for the three provinces’ share in public aid as well as planning for upgrades or building of public infrastructure.

The latest count will also be used to organise upcoming elections, starting with municipal elections (March 2026) and provincial elections later that year.

Uike Kātoanga’i ‘o e lea faka-Tonga, or Tongan Language Week, is under way with schools and community groups organising events throughout the country.

According to Statistics New Zealand, there are more than 82,000 people of Tongan heritage living in New Zealand, and there are concerns about younger generations of Kiwi-Tongans losing their mother tongue.

“A lot of our kids unfortunately don’t grow up in households where Tongan is spoken as a first language, and this is one of the goals of language week is to encourage our young people to learn about our language, to learn about our culture”, said Jenny Salesa, a Labour MP of Tongan heritage.

• READ MORE: Other reports on Pacific language weeks

“The majority of our Tongan people here in Aotearoa now, are born and raised here. I think over 60 or 70 percent.”

Salesa, who helps organise the annual event, said she haD heard during her public consultations that many young Kiwi-Tongans complainED of an identity crisis, and said language weeks were a temporary relief for many young Pasifika who felt culturally marginalised.

“Some of them say they would just like to be acknowledged as a Tongan and not just during language weeks where we encourage and acknowledge Tongan in their school,” she said.

“They would like their identity and their language to be acknowledged throughout the whole year and not just within one week.”

The theme for this year’s Tongan Language Week is Ke Tu’uloa ‘a e lea faka-Tonga ‘i Aotearoa or “Sustaining the Tonga Language in Aotearoa”.

It’s unpoetic compared to highly metaphorical themes in previous years, but the message reflects the primary purpose behind the event.

“Sadly, only 12 percent of Tongans under 15 speak the language in New Zealand. That’s a decline of 9 percent since 2006,” said the Minister for Pacific Peoples, Aupito William Sio, who officially launched the week at Otahuhu College, Auckland.

“Language week is the ideal time to revitalise lea fakatonga, and embrace our Tongan brothers and sister culture, values and traditions,” he said.

Annual Pasifika language weeks have been in place in New Zealand since 2010, and have been promoted aggressively by the Ministry for Pacific Peoples.

‘Speaking the language of your heritage strengthens self confidence’
Singing and dancing have been key components of Tongan Language Week. Traditional Tongan dances have been performed by Tongan and non-Tongan students in school assemblies throughout the country.

Otahuhu College Tongan language teacher Tina Otunuku said traditional dances were performed by students at their school assembly on Tuesday. She said the cultural performances brought out the “mafana” or warmth of spirit.

“The highlight of the day was a performance from disabled and special needs children, and they did well. All the students joined in. We didn’t expect that to happen, it was incredible”, said Otunuku.

“Maintaining your lea fakatonga (Tongan) or Pacific language here in Aotearoa, helps you to value your culture and heritage which contributes to a positive self conscious. Knowing how to speak the language of your heritage, strengthens your self confidence.”

Otunuku said a common mistake made by immigrant parents in New Zealand was to discourage their immigrant children from speaking their native tongue in the belief it would improve their schooling.

“When students who are not yet fluent in English, switch to using English only, they are functioning at an intellectual level below their age. In this manner, it is likely to result in academic failure and this is what happens to a lot of Tongan students here.”

“You know students who learn English and continue to develop their mother tongue, have higher economic achievement in later years, than students who learn English at the expense of their native language.”

Tongan princess launching learning app
As part of the week, a Tongan language learning app is being launched at Parliament in Wellington on Saturday by Tongan Princess Angelika Lātūfuipeka.

Wellington Tongan Leaders Council President Taetuna’ula Tuinukuafe said the app is dedicated to teaching the Tongan language which will be made accessible worldwide.

Tuinukuafe said that while the app is intended for Tongan children who live overseas, it can be used by anyone who has an interest in learning the Tongan language.

“Our young people who are growing up here are not connected to our community and our culture. For the Tongan statistics more than half or 53 percent or so that are born here in New Zealand and they need to understand and learn the language and communicate with their fanau.”

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

In my household, the 1970s BBC comedy Fawlty Towers is on regular repeat for family entertainment.

Only two years ago it was authoritatively ranked as the greatest British sitcom ever.

Starring the six-foot-five manic comedian John Cleese, it depicts life in a chaotic English seaside hotel.

• READ MORE: Fiji government sacking of chief statistician branded ‘shameful’

Its owner, Basil Fawlty, is a man who thinks he is always right. His attempts to cover up small problems quickly turn into major disasters.

If you are already drawing comparisons between Fawlty Towers and the current Fiji government, you would not be the only one.

The most popular of its (only 12) episodes is called “The Germans”. A group of German tourists comes to stay. Basil doesn’t much like Germans but it’s money after all. Obsessed with not offending them he instructs everybody “don’t mention the war”.

The more he tries not to mention the war, the worse it gets. By the end of the episode he is doing frog-marching Hitler impressions and his guests are asking: “How did they ever win?”

This is what comes to mind when I think of our government and ethnic population data.

The more the government tries to pretend it doesn’t exist, the more public the issue becomes.

Statistics saga
The media was treated last week to an 8pm peroration from Attorney-General Aiyaz Sayed-Khaiyum. Maybe he forgot that this was way past every media company’s news deadline (the editors of the Fiji Sun, however, seemed to extend theirs so they could report the speech the next day).

The head of the Statistics Bureau was fired, marched out from his office by security personnel.

That guaranteed another cycle of bad press as opposition parties and NGOs issued statements and social media lit up.

Immediately the critics reminded us of what happens when the Attorney-General loses an argument. Vice-chancellors get deported.

The media is attacked for bias. He blasts his own lawyers for losing a court case (the “winning argument” he says they missed would be laughed out of any remotely sane court).

Why?

Comedy aside, surely the question to ask about this disaster-prone policy is “why”? I know of no other nation in the world where the government tells the people “you are not allowed to know the ethnic breakdown of people in your own country because it is bad for you”.

Those who question this policy are attacked by the Attorney-General as “obsessed with ethnicity”.

But a lot of effort and drama has gone into suppressing what is usual (and critically important) demographic information. Now it has been applied to punishing the man who made it available.

All of this seems to suggest that it is the Attorney-General, not us, who is obsessed.

“It is a big issue,” he told the media. “If you are going to start having compassion for people based on their ethnicity, then you are losing your sense of humanity and that’s precisely what has happened”.

Really? When did that happen?

When did we all decide that we would “have compassion” for only one ethnic group? We’ve barely had time to understand the data.

Mind-numbingly obvious
It is mind-numbingly obvious why ethnic data is important to government policymaking and operations.

As opposition MP Lenora Qereqeretabua put it two years ago, calling us all “Fijians” doesn’t make us the same”.

New Zealand health authorities have heart disease profiles for Indo-Fijians, a tiny slice of their own society. Why? Because they are “obsessed with ethnicity”?

No, because they understand that different ethnic groups have particular physiologies, diets and even lifestyles. They use the information to save lives.

Anecdotal evidence suggests that in Fiji the take up of coronavirus vaccines is lower in the indigenous population than for other races.

If everybody had the data, NGOs and health authorities could co-operate in working out why. They could upgrade the messaging and vaccination strategies to respond.

Because as we are all reminded, no Fijian is safe until everyone is vaccinated.

In the middle of the coronavirus it took weeks for the government to even start communicating virus information in vernacular languages.

Why? Were they instructed not to be “obsessed with ethnicity”?

Affirmative action
We need to understand ethnic performance gaps in critical areas such as education and poverty, representation in business and professional life. If we don’t, how are we going to fix them?

Are we going to pretend that cultures and lifestyles play no part in these gaps? Are we going to pretend that we can’t use targeted programmes and information to close them?

Past governments – yes, those evil “past governments” which get blamed for everything bad — tried to respond to these gaps with “affirmative action” policies in education and economic support. They were not, in my opinion, very effective.

In my view they addressed the symptoms, rather than the causes, of these gaps. So (in my view) it was necessary to re-think the affirmative action policies, look critically at what had gone wrong, and re-design them.

The gaps have not gone away. But for 15 years we have not been allowed to talk about them. So that is 15 years in which we have lost the opportunity to look for new, imaginative ways to deal with the gaps.

Fiji is like every other multiracial country in the world. Race is a natural fault line.

You cannot paper it over by saying “the Constitution says we are all Fijians now”.

When things go wrong, in times of economic, social and political stress, people look for simple answers to their problems.

Sometimes they are encouraged to find those simple answers by blaming people who do not look like them or speak like them.

And that’s when things go wrong. The explosions of 1987 and 2000 are not so long ago.

Are we all trying to pretend that these things could not happen again?

The current government seems to think that warning us against racism, or arresting people who criticise Bill 17, will deal with the problem (or maybe solve their own future election problems).

Nation-building
But like everything in the stunted and short-sighted vision they have offered us for 15 years, this government doesn’t seem to understand the essence of nation-building.

Our government seems to think that a nation is built when everyone is brought under control by the government and ordered around.

So, apparently, we must all call ourselves “Fijians”. We must pretend that we are all the same.

We must not be allowed our own local governments in case they disagree with the people in Suva. We must not be allowed autonomy in the schools that in many cases our own forefathers or religious communities built.

In the midst of our worst ever health and economic crisis, non-governmental organisations, charities and private citizens should not get government support because they cannot be controlled.

Instead, government will do everything. Dial 161 and take your chances.

But nations are not built like that. Nations are built by their people, helped by (not ordered around by) their governments.

Citizens do the building
In a well-run nation, it is the citizens who do the building. It is the citizens working together, in business, in community organisations, schools, health, in advocacy for minority groups, in town and city councils, who build.

They know what their communities need and respond to those needs.

The citizens, through their councils and committees and charitable trusts, argue with and criticise and demand things from the government. Because after all, the people who run the government are supposed to work for them.

It is citizens who can come up with the ideas and demand action and support from the government to deal with the obvious ethnic differences in income and poverty levels, in education and in other critical areas of national life.

But how can they do that when they don’t have the information and are not allowed to talk about it? All we have to talk about, it seems, is what will be the next episode in our very own series of Fawlty Towers.

Richard Naidu is a Suva lawyer, media commentator and former journalist in New Zealand and Fiji. His workmates think he is a bit like Basil Fawlty. This article was originally published in The Fiji Times and is republished by Asia Pacific Report with the author’s permission.

Questions have been raised about why the head of Fiji’s Bureau of Statistics was fired by the Bainimarama government this week.

Kemueli Naiqama recently published this year’s household income and expenditure survey that showed three quarters of Fiji’s poorest people are indigenous Fijians, or i-Taukei.

It is the first time ethnicity has featured in data published in the annual survey.

• READ MORE: Fiji Bureau of Statistics CEO escorted out of his office

RNZ’s correspondent in the capital Suva, Lice Movono, told RNZ FirstUp the bureau had been “enhancing their ability to report information” and trying to be in line with sustainable development goals reporting.

“And the latest report shows that the poorest people in this country are the i-Taukei people,” Movono said.

“But more importantly that our poverty population — or the population that is living well below the poverty line — is very high.

“It would be directly opposite to the policies of this government to give information segregated according to ethnicity — it would be extremely embarrassing for a government that has been talking about producing an all time record high boom – economic growth,” she said.

Sacking defended
The Statistics Department comes under the Ministry for Economy.

The Minister, Aiyaz Sayed-Khaiyum who is also Fiji’s Attorney-General, has defended his sacking of the country’s chief statistician.

Sayed-Khaiyum questioned the methodology used for the study and labelled it flawed.

“Poverty in Fiji is now measured by consumption, including the food grown in a family backyard, and not just income,” he said.

Sayed-Khaiyum told a media conference in Suva he had issues with the bureau’s analysis of ethnic and religious data in its 2019-2020 Household Income and Expenditure Survey (HIES).

“We appreciate any independent office carrying out a proper, professional independent analysis of any data and understand the importance of reliable, timely and accurate statistics,” Sayed-Khaiyum said.

“And many may not know this or many may not delve further into this — we in fact approved this new methodology of moving away from what we call using the traditional income measure for welfare analysis — to using consumption expenditure for poverty measurement.”

New measuring yardstick
Sayed-Khaiyum said the consumption-based methodology for measuring poverty would “accurately and better assist in policy-making”.

He said the new yardstick did not just look at how much money a household earned but also at how they had access to services.

But there were many who disagreed with the attorney-general.

The University of the South Pacific’s senior lecturer in economics, Dr Neelesh Gounder, said the poverty estimates produced at all levels were reliable.

He said those not happy with the ethnic-based policy needed to target the policy and not the data.

Gounder said the survey was just the “messenger and shooting the messenger would not help.”

“Regarding data on ethnicity, there are several policy areas where ethnic-based data is relevant and required,” Dr Gounder said.

Ethnic data important
“Ethnic data allows us to see beyond presumed beliefs and prejudices that underly ethnic groups and it seems the government wants to avoid race-based policies that may arise from ethnic data.

“Recognising diversity based on ethnicity does not necessarily mean such differences should also lead to policy based on ethnicity.”

However, the government needs to understand that it is not the census or HIES that is causing ethnic tension in Fiji, Dr Gounder said.

The leader of the opposition Social Democratic Liberal Party (SODELPA), Bill Gavoka, said reports Naiqama was escorted out of his office were “shameful”.

“It is truly troubling,” Gavoka said.

He said the Bureau of Statistics is independent of ministers and instead reported directly to Parliament, with staff who are civil servants, but without being under ministerial control.

“The statistics they generate are independent of government and to hear that the FBoS CEO Kemueli Naiqama was unceremoniously dismissed and escorted off-premises for the report of poverty in Fiji, says a lot about the type of democracy we have in Fiji,” Gavoka said.

Independence needed
He said SODELPA wants the Statistics Bureau to have independence from any undue outside influence, especially from a government that has been hyping about a “boom” that many knew was not true.

“The collection, compilation, analysis, abstraction, and publishing of statistical information relating to the economic and general activities must be carried out without fear and SODELPA tells the Attorney-General and FijiFirst, ‘hands off’,” Gavoka said.

By exceeding the scope of data collection and ignoring fact-based methodology, the government said Naiqama had breached the terms of his contract with the ministry.

Under his employment contract, Naiqama will be paid all salary and accrued entitlements for the period up to September 15, 2021.

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

Have you ever noticed, when percentages are used in the print media in reporting political polls, that they almost never add up?

I think this is due to three practices:

1. Only some of the results are published,
2. Don’t know/Refused to Answer are seldom published or included in totals, and
3. the effects of “rounding.

• READ MORE: Other Pacific Media Centre elections stories

This would not happen if the media used tables to show percentages, and if Colmar-Brunton, which conducts polls for 1News, and Reid for Newshub, immediately released the poll.

Instead, they wait until 48 hours after the media has published the results.

So, use tables. They would show the complete results, and in most cases be easier to understand than the efforts of journalists to report them in text alone.

Here’s a topical example. Note especially note 2:

Note 1: Poll taken between 3-7 October 2020. n = 1005. Margin of error ± 3.1%.
Note 2: Don’t know/Refused to Answer who accounted for 130 of those polled were excluded from the party totals which should, therefore, be reduced to total 874, not the 1005 stated..
Note 3: Context. The third Leaders Debate, concerns about NZ First finances and supposed internal divisions within National occurred during this poll period.

Graphs could also be used, and they sometimes are, to good effect but graphs are picture summaries of tables, and conceal whether or not the percentages total one hundred.

Margins of error and weighting
The media usually publish poll margins of error but make no effort to explain their importance. Indeed, they often comment enthusiastically about results that have absolutely no significance, making for misleading information.

The margin of error in most 1News/Colmar Brunton and Newshub/Reid polls is usually ± 3.1 percent. That means for a party that had 50 percent of the vote the actual result would be between 46.9 and 53.1 percent. But for a party with 10 percent of the vote the margin of error is much lower, ± 1.9 percent, and for a party with 5 percent, ± 1.4 percent.

What this usually means is that with the exception of Labour and to a lesser extent National, the results for all the other parties are statistically insignificant. They could all have occcurred by chance.

Similar results over several polls makes low scoring results look more plausible, but minor changes between polls are unworthy of comment.

ACT’s recent increased support to 8 percent and the Greens steady on over the critical 5 percent threshold to get into Parliament are certainly worth a comment but not the minor inter-poll changes for the other small parties.

One other poll method practice is weighting. To make random polls of about 1,000 people accurately reflect the actual compositon of our population in terms of sex, ethnicity, region and landline cellphone access, some of the poll’s composition will be increased and another reduced.

For example, if women are underpresented in the poll, weighting increases the proportion of women and reduces the proportion of men.

It is important to remember this, especially when looking at lower percentages.

Finally, polls take place over several days when other things are happening that could influence how the people polled responded. Context is very important.

Different contexts over different polls could be the “swinging factor” and not other supposed differences over time. The media should always note these happenings, and seldom do.

Dr Crosbie Walsh is a retired founding development studies professor at Massey University and the University of the South Pacific, and a blogger on Pacific affairs. The Pacific Media Centre collaborates with Dr Walsh.