The idea that New Zealand was founded by prisoners or criminals who came here by way of Australia is not true.

The early pioneers who arrived in 1840 spent up to five months in dirty, smelly, leaky ships traveling 26,000km to start a new life of unimagined hardships building the New Zealand that we know today.

There were two categories of pioneers – colonists and emigrants.

Colonists paid their way, traveled cabin class, and dined sumptuously. Colonists who came in the New Zealand Company scheme on the first six ships to Wellington in 1840 bought a land order for ₤100 that entitled them to one town acre and 100 country acres.

Emigrants were the working poor who had a free trip, traveled steerage class, dined better than they did on the slums of old England but nowhere near as well as the colonists, and were to provide labour for the colonists.

The social distinction between colonists and emigrants continued in New Zealand until the 1914-18 war, when the equality of sacrifice in the trenches brought a demand for equality of social recognition.

The scale of that migration should not be underestimated. In 1840 around 2000 settlers lived in New Zealand yet by 1881 there were 470,000 settlers here, vastly outnumbering the Maori population of 46,000.

New Zealand has had a long history of immigration from Britain, with the migrant inflow being especially important in the second half of the 19th century.

War and economic depression disrupted immigration at various times in the first half of the 20th century, but there was another surge of British immigration to New Zealand in the decades after the Second World War.

Assisted immigration continued to 1971.