Dr Oliver Hartwich: NZ shows how not to run a census

Two thousand years ago, according to St Luke, Emperor Augustus decreed that all the world should be registered. A carpenter and his pregnant wife walked from Nazareth to Bethlehem to comply. Evidently, the Romans had little trouble with their census response rate.

Ever since those times, countries have counted their populations. For those filling in the forms, it is a nuisance, to be sure. But governments need reliable figures to plan public services.

Dr Oliver Hartwich: Why we spoke up

Over the past couple of months, we have heard mounting alarm from business leaders about this election campaign. They are asking whether New Zealand still welcomes people willing to invest here. The concern comes from a broad range of industries.

Those conversations prompted an open letter, now signed by 51 business leaders. It asks all political parties to respect private property and the agreements people make.

Dr Oliver Hartwich: An auction of stolen goods

“Every election is a sort of advance auction sale of stolen goods,” H.L. Mencken wrote in 1936. Never has it been truer than in this campaign.

The parties are outdoing each other with ideas about what to take, from whom, and to whom to give it. Robbing Peter to pay Paul is another way of putting it.

Dr Oliver Hartwich: Hobbiton or space nation? NZ can’t seem to decide

New Zealand is barely a military power. It has had no combat aircraft for 25 years, and its ageing frigates need replacing. Lifting defence spending to 2 per cent of GDP passes for ambition. The country comes across as a real-world Hobbiton: peaceful, friendly and not very capable.

Yet one capability puts New Zealand in the club of superpowers, and it is the last one anyone would expect. Last year, only the United States and China saw more rockets leave their soil. New Zealand, with 17 launches, matched Russia.

Dr Oliver Hartwich: Town planners will finally have to answer for land prices

What is politics? According to Max Weber’s classic definition, politics is “a strong and slow boring of hard boards.”

Having worked around politics for over two decades has given me a good idea of what Weber meant by that. Achieving proper policy change is a tough business indeed.

Dr Oliver Hartwich: Birds of a feather

Voting opens today in the most important election of 2026. And no, this is not the General Election.

I am talking about Forest & Bird’s ‘Bird of the Year’. Run annually since 2005, it has become a fixture in New Zealand’s calendar.

Dr Oliver Hartwich: The New Mandarinate

In November 2018, officials at Immigration New Zealand began work on replacing the ageing biometric systems that verify identities and manage immigration risk. Seven years later it was dead, having delivered no measurable benefit. Nobody can yet say what it cost.

Dr Oliver Hartwich: Balancing the books is only half the job

Over the past couple of weeks, the two major parties have told us about their fiscal policies. Both promise to return the budget to surplus before the end of the decade.

National aims to bring down government spending to 30% of GDP, while Labour wants to stabilise it around 33% of GDP. National has pledged not to introduce any new taxes, while Labour is campaigning on a new capital gains tax.

Dr Oliver Hartwich: A bad tax is not a down payment on a good one

On Monday evening, I sat on a panel at Foxglove on Queens Wharf in Wellington, where I was expected to play the neoliberal villain.

The Institute for Democratic and Economic Analysis is a think tank devoted to fighting poverty and political exclusion. It launched a new report on capital gains taxes, including the one Labour has proposed, and invited me to be one of the discussants.

A centre-left think tank, a Wellington audience and a Labour tax policy sounded like a home game for the tax. And I was presumably cast to declare that a capital gains tax would wreck the economy.

However, the evening did not follow that script.

Dr Oliver Hartwich: Spurred by heat from Trump, Iceland votes on reopening frozen EU talks

I have always liked Iceland. My first visit was on a cruise ship in the mid-1990s. Reykjavík felt like a town that had grown from a fishing village, and the country behind was mostly empty.

A few years later, I returned for a proper holiday. It confirmed that earlier impression and added more peculiar observations like tiny but ridiculously priced hotel rooms or spotting puffin on the menu of a restaurant in the capital. In the end, I passed on that and had the most expensive pizza in my life instead.

Dr Oliver Hartwich: New Zealand needs asset recycling to fund its infrastructure future

A fortnight ago, the government agreed a sale worth $702 million. Nicola Willis and Chris Bishop sold the loans the Crown made to Chorus to help build the ultrafast broadband network, for $60 million above book value.

The money, we were told, will go to the Cambridge to Piarere expressway, hospital upgrades and new classrooms.

Dr Oliver Hartwich: If I were PM - Fix the machine before the policies

On my first morning as Prime Minister, I would deliver a speech. It would contain no slogans or platitudes about becoming the best country in the world. Instead, it would be a stocktake, and it would not be a pleasant one.

I would tell New Zealanders what they already sense: the country has been slipping down the income rankings of the developed world for decades. The government’s books have been in deficit for years, and an ageing population will make both problems worse.

Dr Oliver Hartwich: Tactical voting could sink MMP

At its campaign launch in Gisborne on Sunday, Te Pāti Māori asked its supporters for something no party had requested so openly before: candidate votes for the party, party votes for its allies on the left.

The request rests on MMP’s overhang rule. A party that wins more electorates than its party vote covers keeps them all, and Parliament grows.

Dr Oliver Hartwich: Nothing gets done in NZ’s coalitions of the unwilling

When New Zealanders go to the polls on 7 November, they will be spoilt for choice. In the main, there are two larger (Labour and National) and five smaller parties (ACT, Greens, NZ First, Opportunity, Te Pāti Māori). Each has its own ideas about a cure for the country’s finances, its hospitals, power supply, education system and so on.

Dr Oliver Hartwich: Unravelling MMP - How the 2026 election could break the voting system from two sides

At its campaign launch in Gisborne on Sunday, Te Pāti Māori told its supporters to split their votes: candidate votes for the party, party votes for its allies on the left. A new research note by The New Zealand Initiative warns this call could set off a chain of tactical voting that kills MMP.

Dr Oliver Hartwich: The umlaut premium

Bürgen is leaving New Zealand. After decades on our supermarket shelves, the grainy loaves with the German name will soon be gone.

Except the name was never German. Master baker Doug Leighton invented Bürgen in the 1980s. Its owner, George Weston Foods, is as Australian as Vegemite.

The recipe leaned on Europe, and the umlaut (ü) did the rest.

Dr Oliver Hartwich: Germany silent on suspected Russian drone attack to avoid boosting far right

Drones near airports, at least in New Zealand, are usually a nuisance rather than a threat. They are often flown by careless amateurs who have not read the rules.

What happened at Leipzig airport last Tuesday night was different. A bus driver at the East German airport noticed something hovering just above the southern runway, beside a Ukrainian cargo aircraft. He kicked it out of the air. Then he called security, and the federal police sent a robot. It found a tin can fixed to the drone with a detonator seated in its base.

Dr Oliver Hartwich: Embed, align, continue, refresh

The cover of MBIE’s new Workforce Diversity Action Plan shows nine staff holding signs reading “I belong” in several languages. Inside, it declares itself “People-centred | Performance-driven | Evidence-informed”.

Treasury’s plan appeared a few weeks after MBIE’s. Both are organised around the same three focus areas. Both culminate in the same heading “Apply the merit principle comprehensively”.

Dr Oliver Hartwich: NZ voters trust party names over actual policies

When I specialised in marketing for the business part of my economics degree, I came across a puzzling group of people: consumers. Ask them about their product choices and they will tell you what they care about, how diligently they compare different items and how much weight they put on quality.

Yet analyse what they actually do and a different picture emerges. They infer quality from brand names they have never heard of. They do the same from packaging. They will prefer one of two identical products because one of them somehow feels more premium.

Consumers are strange. So why should they be any different as voters?

Dr Oliver Hartwich: New Zealand ignores the Kiwi who saw the future coming

In 1987, on a school trip to the German countryside, my maths teacher made a prediction. Dr Müller had worked at IBM before turning to teaching in our industrial city, Essen. One day, he mused, fast data connections would let him live in a place like this without giving anything up.

I was twelve and had just unpacked my first computer, an Amiga 500 with 512 kilobytes of memory. I found Dr Müller’s idea so fascinating, I still remember that conversation.