Population
The decline of Māori in Wellington
When the New Zealand Company acquired Wellington from the chiefs Te Puni and Te Wharepōuri in 1839, Māori outnumbered Europeans. But within a year there were 1,200 Europeans living alongside 800 Māori around Port Nicholson (Wellington Harbour).
By 1857 only 63 Māori remained in the town of Wellington. Many had left for remote land reserves, granted in partial compensation for the loss of their Wellington land. Others returned to tribal homelands in Taranaki and elsewhere. In that year, 396 Māori lived in the lower Hutt Valley and 124 in the Upper Hutt district.
European influx
From the 1860s onwards Wellington grew rapidly, mainly because of immigration from Britain, and the growth policies of central government. In 1864 it had 4,741 European residents; by 1901 Wellington had become a city of 49,344 people. Half of these were New Zealand-born.
Māori migration
Attracted by jobs and city life, Māori migrated to the Wellington area after the Second World War – at an average of 100 per year between 1945 and 1956. Between 1961 and 1965 this rose to an average of 457 per year.
British arrivals
British immigration also increased after the war. Many migrants settled in state housing in the Hutt Valley and Porirua. These centres grew strongly until the 1980s, when economic restructuring reduced job opportunities.
Boomtown
Wellington city’s population more than doubled between 1901 and 1936 (to 115,705). After that it grew quite slowly.
In the 1990s further growth was fuelled by economic deregulation and a desire by some to be close to city amenities and culture. In 1991 there were 136,911 residents; by 2006 the city’s population had reached 179,466.
The larger Wellington region’s population also grew during this period, from 343,054 to 410,328. Much of this growth occurred on the Kapiti coast.
Living for the city
A notable trend in Wellington has been the increase in people living in inner-city apartments. Between 2001 and 2006 the number of inner city residents (from Willis Street to Cambridge Terrace) jumped from 3,981 to 5,620 – an increase of 41% in only five years.
Cultural diversity
In the 2000s, many new Wellingtonians came from overseas, especially Asia, reflecting New Zealand’s more flexible immigration policy. In 2006 nearly 80% of the region’s residents described their ethnicity as European or New Zealander. The next largest group were Māori (12.6%), followed by Asian (9.1%) and then Pacific peoples (8.5%). Other groups made up just 1.3% of the population.
While ethnic minorities reside across the region, there are also clusters. Nearly a third (32.6%) of the region’s Māori live in Hutt city, making up 17.1% of its population. Almost two-thirds of the region’s Asians (63.7%) live in Wellington city (13.2% of the city’s population) and over a third (36.2%) of Pacific peoples live in Porirua city (26.6% of the city’s population).
The least ethnically diverse area is the Kapiti district. While 12.2% of residents are Māori, other ethnic minorities comprise only 4.8% of its population.
A cluster of cities
In 2006 the Wellington region consisted of four cities and one district:
- Wellington city (179,466 residents)
- Hutt city (97,701)
- Upper Hutt city (38,415)
- Porirua city (48,546)
- Kapiti Coast district (46,200).
The region is the third most populous in the country, after Auckland and Canterbury.
