Between a rock and a hard place? What the structure of New Zealand society means for greens & the Greens.

8 Tribes: The Hidden Classes of New Zealand (by Jill Caldwell & Christopher Brown) is a thought provoking little book about New Zealand society. It certainly has some significant gaps and omissions – lumping most Maori, Polynesian and other large-family non-European immigrant New Zealanders into the ‘Otara’ tribe is one of them, and silence about Asian New Zealanders is another. But it doesn’t pretend to be a scientific analysis, rather it presents the 8 ‘tribes’ as sharp caricatures  of recognisable segments of contemporary Aotearoa New Zealand society. And those caricatures certainly provide some food for thought, from the perspective of green politics and the green movement.