This paper is a contribution to the FRST funded “missing men” programme.  It puts the 2006 occupational distribution of Australian resident Maori in context as an important component of the transnational “New Zealand” sourced working population.  It extends results published in Newell and Callister (2008) on the concentration of Maori Ancestry residents of Australia with the corresponding occupational distribution of Maori ethnicity (total response) residents of New Zealand at the time of the 2006 census.  It compares differences in the occupational distribution of Maori residents by age and gender with Australian residents overall and New Zealand resident Maori.  It discusses what these results suggest on the differences between Maori trans-Tasman migrants and stayers and on the differences in comparative distribution of Maori by occupation in New Zealand and Australia.

The results show that Australia residents of Maori ancestry make up a very large component to the working Australasian Maori population.  One in five Australasian Maori males aged 25 to 34 years and one in six of working New Zealand born Australia resident males were resident in Australia in 2006.  The Australia resident Maori population has a sex ratio of 1.24 compared to only 1.08 for the New Zealand resident Maori population.

The general picture shows that Maori in Australia are under-under-represented in the skilled occupational groups such as management, professions in particular.  In contrast there tends to be heavy over-representation in “machinery operators and drivers’ and “labourers” and “sales workers”, and this is more marked amongst males than females. Both male and female Maori in Australia also have markedly different occupational distributions from Maori of like age in New Zealand.

The occupational distribution of Australia resident Maori at major group level is closest to that of New Zealand residents of Pasifica ethnicity not to New Zealand resident Maori. The only exception to this at major occupational group level is for males aged 15 to 24 years, which are least dissimilar in occupational distribution to New Zealand resident Maori. This suggests that Australia resident Maori are selecting for jobs in a peripheral lower skill segment of the labour market similar to the role of those of Pasifika ethnicity in the New Zealand labour market. 

Although these statistics might be interpreted to mean that there is a disproportionate migration of Maori with lower skills to Australia to take up the assumed higher wages and better conditions offered in corresponding Australian occupations, it may be that the high wage rates of some Australian jobs in the “machinery operators and drivers” occupations for example may be drawing on skilled as well as unskilled Maori.  The extent to which this is occurring would be possible to explore by comparing the educational attainment levels of Maori working in corresponding New Zealand and Australian occupations.

Analysis of Australia resident Maori distribution at Australian state level or lower would help to show the extent of the direct “pull” factor of the Australian mining boom on trans-tasman movement of New Zealand Maori, but the extent of indirect pull effects due to flow on labour market effects at state and national level would be much more difficult to establish.

This working paper contributes the Institute for Policy Studies led Foundation for Research, Science and Technology funded Education capital formation, employment, migration, gender, work-life balance and missing men (Short title Missing men) project. The home page for this project is at http://ips.ac.nz/events/completed-activities/Missing%20men/Missing%20men.html.