Bhaskar Sunkara’s complaint that diversity in Britain has been turned into a perverse form of multiculturalism is provocative, but it points to a real problem. He has argued in a video discussion that multiculturalism can be hollowed out into a managerial politics of diversity; see also his related critique of liberal anti-racism here. The issue is not diversity itself. It is the way diversity can be managed from above as a performance: visible, ceremonial, and well-spoken, yet detached from the harder work of building common life. My concern is that Aotearoa New Zealand is drifting into a similar condition. We have the language of social cohesion, the frameworks, the consultations, the workshops, the listening sessions, the festivals, the advisory panels, and the familiar circuit of approved community voices. What we do not yet have is the institutional machinery that can carry cohesion into society as lived practice.

The Royal Commission of Inquiry into the Christchurch terrorist attack treated social cohesion as a matter for the whole country, not merely for “ethnic communities”. It argued that polarised societies create conditions in which radicalising ideologies can flourish and said that stronger public-sector leadership on social cohesion would help prevent extremism. It recommended that the Ministry of Social Development lead a whole-of-government approach, and that government collaborate with communities, civil society, local government, and the private sector on a strategic framework and monitoring regime. It also stressed that social cohesion, social inclusion, and diversity involve all New Zealanders, not only ethnic communities.

MSD responded with Te Korowai Whetū. In developing it, officials spoke with communities between July 2021 and March 2022, and reported hearing about discrimination based on gender, faith, sexuality, geography, and other differences. Those communities, MSD says, wanted identity and culture to be valued, respected, and celebrated. On paper, the framework is coherent. The visual summary identifies actions, outcomes, and four central enablers: leadership and willingness to take risks, community-driven development, flexible approaches that recognise different needs, and inclusive quantitative and qualitative data research.

But this is precisely where the problem begins. The weakness is not diagnosis. It is transmission. The framework describes what a cohesive society should aspire to look like, yet the enabler layer remains the least operationalised part of the whole exercise. Aotearoa has produced a strategic language of cohesion, but not a convincing method for carrying it into ordinary social life. The state can convene, consult, publish, and measure. It is much less capable of building the local institutions, habits, and cross-cutting forms of participation that make cohesion durable.

That is why the process keeps falling back into what might be called elite or NGO multiculturalism. A society cannot rely on festivals, food, advisory panels, workshops, listening sessions, and repetitive talk shops to produce solidarity. Those activities may acknowledge difference. They may create visibility. They may even generate goodwill for a day. But they do not by themselves build trust, common obligation, or a thicker civic world. The point is not that such activities are useless. It is that they are too often mistaken for the thing itself.

My earlier argument in the Illusion of Cohesion was that Aotearoa risks confusing visible diversity with deeper integration. Settlement services remain short-term, multicultural policy settings are too often centred on cultural festivities rather than long-term integration, and some self-described “community-led” figures operate in a closed loop without genuine grassroots connection. The result is episodic representation without durable sociopolitical growth. Just as importantly, many locally born or locally schooled children of migrant communities quietly opt out of community dialogue altogether. They experience community as a site of tension rather than belonging, yet their silence is seldom recognised as part of the cohesion problem.

This is not just an abstract concern. Migration is a disruptive process. Intellectual or independent-minded migrants often find themselves isolated, targeted, or pushed aside within their own communities. Meanwhile, many low-skilled migrants, under economic pressure and status anxiety, are drawn into survival, earning, display, and private advancement rather than collective civic organisation. In that setting, the “community voice” presented to government is often not the community as such, but a brokered subset of it.

Recent evidence suggests the wider cohesion problem is real. The 2025 Helen Clark Foundation report found that New Zealand scored 49 percent on positive social cohesion measures compared with 56 percent in Australia, and lagged Australia on every dimension measured. It reported that the biggest fracturing in New Zealand appeared across political preference, work participation, income, and ethnicity. It also found weaker local belonging, lower satisfaction with financial circumstances and happiness, lower participation in social or religious groups, and less positive attitudes towards migrants than in Australia.

That matters because it shows the cracks are not merely cultural. They are structural. Social cohesion is being weakened by inequality, insecurity, weak participation, and shallow forms of social contact. In that context, “community-driven development” cannot simply mean handing the microphone to whichever intermediaries already know how to speak bureaucratic language. Purely ethnic organisation is too easily captured by notables, grant brokers, religious conservatives, or safe representatives. If the state does not understand that, it will keep mistaking managed access for real capacity.

The alternative is not assimilation, and it is not the abandonment of diversity. It is building cohesion through everyday shared institutions, not symbolic consultation. People build trust more easily when they meet as parents, workers, tenants, students, neighbours, and residents, not only as ethnic representatives. That is why a school-parent network, youth mentoring scheme, renters’ group, workers’ rights clinic, neighbourhood association, sports club, homework support group, community garden, local history project, residents’ forum, public library programme, and shared volunteering initiative can do more for cohesion than another round of talk shops. Shared activity builds stronger belonging than staged recognition.

So the elephant in the room is now clear. Aotearoa does not lack frameworks, values statements, or consultation language. It lacks the practical machinery that turns them into lived, shared belonging. Until that changes, elite multiculturalism will go on recycling talk shops while the deeper work of cohesion remains undone.