Race Relations Commissioner Dr Melissa Derby has relaunched an updated Statement on Religious Diversity, the first revision of the document in nearly seven years, according to RNZ.

The statement, originally published in 2007 by the Human Rights Commission (Te Kāhui Tika Tangata), was revised following extensive consultation with religious and faith groups across New Zealand. It carries a foreword from the Prime Minister — a signal of cross-institutional weight that the original document did not have.

Derby framed the update plainly: "Diversity does not need to be a source of division for the rest of us." She said the revision was timely given a recent pattern of race-based attacks, both online and in person, and that faith communities had written to her expressing concern for their safety in concrete terms — not abstractly, but in real terms about real incidents.

The backdrop is a country whose religious landscape has shifted materially since the statement was first written. The 2023 Census recorded that 51.6% of New Zealanders identified with no religion — the first time that figure has exceeded half in the history of religious affiliation measurement in this country. That statistical threshold matters: it means the statement now speaks to a majority-non-religious population alongside a diverse and, in some quarters, increasingly anxious set of minority faith communities.

The gap between those two realities — a secularising majority and faith communities that feel exposed to hostility — is the policy problem the updated statement is attempting to address. Derby's framing of diversity as something that need not generate division is directed at both sides of that equation: at those whose hostility toward religious minorities is driving the complaints she is receiving, and at the broader public she is asking to hold the space.

A document like the Statement on Religious Diversity is not a legally enforceable instrument. Its weight is normative and political. That the Prime Minister has contributed a foreword upgrades its status from a Human Rights Commission position paper to something closer to a government-endorsed standard — which gives Derby more leverage in any subsequent engagement with agencies, employers, or local government bodies over how they treat religious minorities. Whether that leverage translates into changed practice depends on follow-through that the statement itself cannot compel.

The nearly seven-year gap since the previous revision is notable. A lot has changed in that period: the 15 March 2019 mosque attacks in Ōtautahi Christchurch, sustained growth in religiously motivated online harassment, and the demographic shift confirmed by the 2023 Census. The consultation process Derby has described suggests the Commission was deliberate about not updating the document in isolation — grounding the revision in what communities said they needed, rather than what officials assumed.