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| The serene beauty of Stewart
Island at the Southern tip of New Zealand |
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New Zealand is an independent nation and a member of the Commonwealth of Nations and founding member of the United Nations. It has an increasingly diverse multi-cultural population of more than 4.2 million people. While the majority of New Zealanders are of British or European descent, at the 2006 Census, New Zealand's indigenous Maori people accounted for 14.6 percent of the population, followed by those of Asian (9.2 percent) and Pacific (6.9 percent) descent.
The Maori were New Zealand's first settlers and Maori oral tradition tells of an ancestral home of Hawaiki. It is now believed that New Zealand was settled by people from East Polynesia—the Southern Cook and Society islands region. It also the prevailing consensus that they migrated deliberately, setting off in different canoes, at different times; and that they first arrived between 800 and 1000 years ago.
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| The magnificent harbour at
Wellington, the capital of New Zealand |
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The first documented European visitor to New Zealand was the Dutch navigator Abel Tasman, who sighted New Zealand in mid-December 1642. More than 125 years later, in search of the fabled great southern continent, British explorer James Cook, sighted New Zealand on 6 October 1769. By April 1770, when he left to chart the Australian east coast, he had mapped the entire coastline, confirming that New Zealand was not a vast southern landmass.
The Treaty of Waitangi, New Zealand 's founding document, established the country as a nation in 1840. Representative government was established with the passage of the New Zealand Constitution Act by the British Parliament in 1852, with the first Parliament meeting in Auckland two years later. The Capital was moved to Wellington in 1865.
New Zealand ceased to be colony in 1907 when it became a Dominion within the British Empire. Dominion status, however, was more a change of name and did not make New Zealand any more independent from Britain. New Zealand did not adopt the Statute of Westminster 1931, which removed the right of the British Parliament to legislate for New Zealand without its request and consent, until 1947. With the passage of the Constitution Act 1986, the New Zealand Parliament removed the last provisions for the British Parliament to make laws for New Zealand.
New Zealand is a modern country with a well-developed economy and a government structure based on the British parliamentary system. More information on New Zealand's government can be found at New Zealand Government Online.
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