New Zealand's retiring Governor-General, Dame Sylvia Cartwright, shocked the nation by discussing its “dark secrets” at her retirement ceremony last week.

“Sometimes when I listen to a foreign leader praise our efforts on the environment or our willingness to assist those in war-ravaged countries, I hope that our dark secrets — for they remain hidden to the rest of the world — will never become known internationally,” she said.

“I am concerned that these countries that so admire us might soon learn that we have a terrible rate of family and other violence.”

The cat’s out of the bag now, isn’t it.

Times of London columnist Jamie Whyte connects New Zealand’s domestic violence problem to a broader social phenomenon: the increasing prevalence of hoons.

Hoons are the underclass of New Zealand. They are inarticulate and unkempt to a degree that would appal even a chav. (No Burberry caps for hoons; simply wearing shoes often takes too much sartorial effort.) But, in other respects, hoons are just like the underclass of any other modern Western country.

They often grow up without their fathers. The succession of “uncles” who come through their home may beat or rape them. They attend school only because it is compulsory until sixteen, and leave having acquired neither an education nor any qualifications. They work in unskilled jobs, if they work at all. They have no interests and no ambitions, unless you count sex and intoxication (especially from marijuana, which grows like a weed in New Zealand). The sex leads to children, but rarely to marriage. They smoke, eat junk and die younger than the rest of us. And then their children do it all over again.

It is in this subculture of listless depravity that women and children are so frequently murdered and abused. And it is because New Zealand has such a large underclass that its social statistics are so bad.

New Zealand’s underclass seems to have disproportionate representation from the country’s aboriginal people, the Maori.

Maori are 15 per cent of the population, but 50 per cent of the prison population. Forty per cent of Maori children grow up in fatherless homes, compared with 17 per cent of whites. A third of Maori boys leave school with no qualification, compared with 13 per cent of white boys. The child murder rate is 1.5 per 100,000 among Maori, compared with 0.7 among whites. Maori life expectancy is seven years less than that of whites.

The recent founding of the Maori Party gives hope that social dysfunction in New Zealand will be addressed.  The party advocates curtailing welfare dependency and restoring the importance of the family in society.