Paul Spoonley

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.

After being appointed as a co-director of He Whenua Taurikura (Centre for Preventing and Countering Violent Extremism) in June 2022, Spoonley said there was a "definite rise of anti-semitism and Islamophobia through the online landscape in New Zealand", and noted that the Government had commissioned the Institute for Strategic Dialogue and Te Pūnaha Matatini to research the online environment in the country.

In 2022, Spoonley told Kathryn Ryan on RNZ that while generally around the world, COVID-19 had seen a drop in life expectancy in New Zealand, there has been an increase of around eight months. He said this drop is likely a result of fewer deaths during the beginning of the pandemic and the measures put in place to manage COVID-19. Birth rates initially slowed during COVID-19 due to people being unsure about their jobs or anxious about bringing children into a world dealing with a pandemic. Spoonley noted that in 2020 New Zealand had its lowest birth rate since the 1980s, and while this increased in 2021, it was still below a plateau of 60,000 reached in 2016. He said that during the 1990s and early 2020s this population growth rate was the highest of any OECD country. Although this had reduced early in COVID-19, it is important for policymakers to remember that two-thirds of population growth comes from migration and measures to manage this need to look at the capacity of New Zealand to absorb migrants without putting infrastructure under pressure. He questioned whether the immigration policies of New Zealand are "fit for purpose", suggesting they need to consider an international labour shortage and the impact that the measures taken to address the pandemic had on immigrant communities, particularly in how families became divided. Spoonley suggested that post-COVID New Zealand accept a net population loss and develop initiatives to attract and hold migrants. He acknowledged that New Zealand struggles to be competitive internationally with wages, but concludes that "migrants tend to come to NZ because of life style, education and safety of the country", and the challenge is to have the capacity to process applications.

As the 2022 Wellington protest entered its third week, Toby Manhire noted that a paper co-authored by Spoonley in December 2021, had identified that New Zealand was trending toward more public displays of "anger, fear, and hatred of others...[possibly]... accelerated by some responses to actions taken to address the Covid-19 pandemic....from members of society who, for historical and other reasons, have low trust in government or in other elites such as medical scientists." Spoonley responded that while there were high levels of compliance during the pandemic which showed some social cohesion, discussing this with a bottom up approach was necessary and working with local communities, particularly Māori and Pasifika was crucial in achieving genuinely cohesive outcomes. In the same article, Spoonley said online toxicity remained a concern and the protests at parliament served as warning of a "vitriolic element" that could enable extremists to undermine social cohesion by violence.

After the police made a move to block entry and exit points into the occupation, Spoonley said it was necessary to both preserve the right to protest and ensure public safety. He suggested that force by police may be necessary because some of the protesters blatantly did not accept legal authorities and online threats and the deliberate spreading of mis- and disinformation was highlighting the "malign influence of conspiratorial and socially destructive views for our liberal democracy." By 3 March 2022, Spoonley was commenting on the visibility of extremism at the protest, acknowledging that while historically there had previously been anti-authority and "conspiratorial views" in New Zealand, COVID-19 had given impetus to a wider range of groups that held these ideas and the police appeared to have been caught off guard about the effect they were having on the protest. He suggested that many New Zealanders may have been "surprised and saddened about the extremist politics visible at the Parliament protest...[and]...the challenge now is to ensure further hate crimes or violence do not follow." When concerned were expressed in the media about the threats and violence at the protest and how this was manifesting as 'hate messages' that were offensive to Muslims, Spoonley said this partly reflected an increase in the online presence of the alt-right and other conspiratorial groups, resulting in wide-ranging online hate that was proving difficult for the authorities to manage.

The New Zealand Government announced an immigration reset in May 2021 that reduced the immigrant numbers. Stuart Nash the Economic Development Minister said it was a response to the threat of COVID-19 and an opportunity get a balance for foreign labour while encouraging incentives to upskill local workers. There were mixed responses to the measure including that it was "scapegoating migrants for problems with housing, infrastructure and working conditions", that it lacked detail and would not address the worker shortage. Spoonley however, said that the high numbers of temporary and permanent workers entering New Zealand over recent years had probably not been sustainable, put pressure on infrastructure and by being over-reliant on cheap foreign labour, had diverted a focus on developing new technology to increase productivity - a situation that Spoonley said was [possibly] "preventing New Zealand preparing for an entirely different and fast-approaching future." The New Zealand Productivity Commission conducted an inquiry before the reset was announced and their findings were released in November 2021. Spoonley said that the report showed a tightening up of policy settings around temporary workers and the opportunity for them to transition to residency and "suggest[ed] that some industries might...[have needed]...to justify why they’re on the skills shortage list...[in effect]...tying migration more to demand in the local labour market."

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. He said that the challenge was for the country to adapt to a different demography, and the default response that this would be solved by immigration was unlikely to provide the solution, exacerbated by the impact of lockdowns to manage the pandemic. In the same opinion piece, Spoonley said that a growing concentration of New Zealand's population growth in Auckland, would need policy interventions by the government to prevent "stagnation...[or]...decline" in other parts of the country. His conclusion was that the changes were "unprecedented", the policy framework was not "fit for purpose" and what was needed was "an agreed population policy, and a greater public awareness of how significant and disruptive these changes are going to be." He confirmed this position at a presentation to the Institute of Directors in New Zealand in May 2021, with a caveat that a population policy was not just about managing immigration and the other factors needed to be taken into consideration. He did add however, that immigration is often seen just as a source of labour for New Zealand rather than a factor that has "dramatically altered" the population of the country.

The effect of COVID-19 on social cohesion within New Zealand has also been examined by Spoonley. In 2020, he co-authored a paper that evaluates the challenges faced by the country as it emerges from the pandemic to make an effective "human- and society-centered reset". The paper takes the position that "the crisis has brought into stark relief the position of those who were already experiencing social and economic difficulties...[and]...with expanded vulnerability, many may become angry, frustrated, depressed, anxious and suffer a loss of hope which may persist for years." The authors note that this can threaten social cohesion and if New Zealand is to be a resilient society and deal with the unaddressed issues, it is essential to enquire into what new vulnerabilities may arise, whether the vulnerable become more or less recognised and the levels of trust in the country's institutions and government.

A New Zealand news service Stuff discussed a document on 10 March 2020 that had allegedly been prepared by a neo-Nazi group Action Zealandia and told its members to refuse any interviews and detailed the powers of the New Zealand Security Intelligence Service (SIS), the Government Communications Security Bureau (GSSB) and a special investigation group established by the New Zealand Police, which according to the manual was trained to "coerce" information from people. Spoonley commented that this was more comprehensive than anything he had previously researched and made the point it indicated that there is a "degree of sophistication, especially in relation to online far-right activities, which is new and concerning."

Spoonley was involved in a 2020 survey that identified the three most important diversity issues in Kiwi organisations as wellbeing, gender equity and bias and noted that the disruptions of COVID-19 had caused further challenges that needed to be solved collectively to emerge into the "new normality". The survey paper concluded:

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.

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. 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 now had platforms of social media that were independent of others such as Facebook and could circulate their ideology without being "subject to moderation and regulation."

In 2019 Spoonley was involved in review of how the issue of social cohesion had been handled by New Zealand governments since the introduction of an "indicator framework for assessing immigrant and host outcomes" in 2005. The authors note that an approach which focuses on developing indicators of "cohesive ties" that point to the small mechanisms that contribute to "unity, togetherness, continuity, coherence, connection, linkages and interrelatedness between people and groups...has the potential to shift the conversation away from the relatively ubiquitous emphasis on cohesion as a property of ethnic differentiation...towards an understanding that differences between individuals and groups are multi-faceted, inevitable and enriching." The same paper held, therefore, that there were three ways to re-consider social cohesion in a New Zealand context: give more space to Māori to define the concept; avoid a narrow concern with cohesion being primarily about ethnic differences and take a wider, yet more inclusive approach, that built awareness of how digital spaces can engender prejudices and hate toward those of different gender, age or religious beliefs; and to understand how interconnections that are not threatening happen when there is a conscious effort by people to "build knowledge of each other in everyday engagement..to give more robust meaning to discussions about cohesion – and to the possibilities for enhancing it."

Spoonley retired from his position as Pro Vice-Chancellor at Massey University in 2019 to work on a book in which he expressed concerns with the "far right, and particularly ultra-nationalists and white supremacists being reinvented as the Alt-Right...[and becoming]... much more successful in influencing mainstream debate and political actors." Sharing an opinion piece in 2020, Spoonley argued that far-right extremism "remains a high-level threat in New Zealand." In 2020, Spoonley published an article in which he recalled how in 2010, during his time at the University of Berkeley, he became aware of a political movement called the Tea Party that had "established a legacy of radical populism and, among its more extreme members, a new form of white identity politics." He was concerned at the degree that radical right-wing groups were using the internet to influence people and this came more into focus after the Christchurch mosque shootings in 2019.

In 2021, the New Zealand Government convened He Whenua Taurikura: New Zealand’s Hui on Countering Terrorism and Violent Extremism in response to a recommendation of The Royal Commission of Inquiry into the Christchurch mosque shootings on 15 March 2019. Jacinda Ardern explained that this was to be the first annual hui to "look at ways to challenge hate-motivated extremist ideologies and to discuss priorities to address issues of terrorism and violent extremism. At the conference Spoonley presented, as part of a panel, in a session called Addressing the causes: how can embracing community and diversity-focused approaches contribute to preventing and countering violent extremism. He noted that the research he had done in the 1970s remained relevant in 2021 despite changes such as an increase in Islamophobia and the rise of the interconnectedness New Zealand had with international extremism. He stated it was still important to not assume there was a consensus that all social cohesion was good, but acknowledged that "approaches should not focus entirely on immigrant/host relations, but should have foundations in Te Tiriti o Waitangi, be country-specific (consider what factors contribute to social cohesion in New Zealand, and what radicalises individuals here), and incorporate co-design – with community participation and leadership."

In 2018 Spoonley was chosen to join Jan Rath from the University of Amsterdam as co-chair of the Metropolis International Project. He explained that the project, which focuses on empirical research and analysis as a "global network" has 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 presented at the Metropolis Conference in Sydney in 2018 providing an overview of big data and how this can 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."

In 2018 Spoonley wrote an article about the history of the alt-right and some of the ideas behind it. He noted that the term applies to a loose coalition of "ultra-nationalists, white supremacists, neo-Nazis and anti-Semites" and first appeared in the United States in 2008, attributed to Richard B. Spencer a neo-Nazi who believed in eugenics and ethnic cleansing to make the United States a white ethno-state. The movement got more exposure in 2016 when Steve Bannon established Breitbart, a right-wing news network. In the light of the Christchurch mosque shootings (2018), Spoonley was critical of New Zealand's complacency about the potential threat from far-right groups, including neo-Nazi and extreme nationalists. A year on from the Christchurch mosque shootings he estimated that there could be 150 – 300 right-wing activists in New Zealand, and cautioned against "a tendency to see the Christchurch attacks, which killed 51 people, as a one-off or an aberration — rather than something we still need to guard against."

In 2011, his contribution to Sociology was acknowledged with the Sociological Association of Aotearoa New Zealand's scholarship for exceptional service to New Zealand sociology.

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."

A fellow of the Royal Society of New Zealand, in 2009 Spoonley was awarded the Royal Society of New Zealand Science and Technology medal in recognition of his academic scholarship, leadership and public contribution to cultural understanding.

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 was a recipient of the New Zealand Commemoration Medal, Government of New Zealand in 1990.

Right-wing populism, racism and the alt-right became an area of interest to Spoonley while studying at the University of Bristol in 1976. As a result of several incidents involving racist violence that happened close to where he was staying, Spoonley was inspired to become an "academic specialist in Right-wing hate." In 1980 he published an article that showed how the ideology of the National Front, a right-wing group in England was reflected in the keywords of the headlines of their publications. Sixty-six per cent of the items had racial cue words that were linked to "conflict disagreement words" such as "threat" and "invade." Spoonley later reflected that when he returned to New Zealand in the 1980s after doing his research on extreme-right group in the United Kingdom, he was told that there were no similar organisations in his home country. In the same article, he recalled that there were more than 70 such extreme groups in New Zealand at that time, with several murders since 1989 having being attributed to white supremacists. Throughout the 1980s Spoonley looked at these groups in New Zealand, noting "they were a mixture of skinhead, neo-nazi and extreme nationalist groups" that held extreme right-wing views with ideologies based on anti-Semitism and the supremacy of the "British race". By the 1990s the internet and social media were playing a role in spreading these ideas and Islamophobia was now supplementing anti-Semitism. In 2018 he conducted a project on hate speech examining what some New Zealanders were saying online and concluded [that] "it did not take long to discover the presence of hateful and anti-Muslim comments." Spoonley later shared with RNZ that the far right in New Zealand was now more technologically sophisticated, connected to international networks and actively trying to get involved in mainstream politics.

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. 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 of New Zealand, and a member of the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity.

Spoonley later advocated for a population policy to manage immigration and find the balance between the numbers and meeting labour and skill demands and argued that the country should have set a target of net migration each year to be around one per cent of the population. Issues included a dropping fertility rate and an ageing population in New Zealand; where immigrants might live; 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 issues around how immigrants were viewed by the local population and including building awareness of the value of diversity and social inclusion and deal with extremism that created anxiety through such things as hate speech and xenophobia. 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."

Paul Spoonley (born 1951) is a New Zealand sociologist and 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. 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.