The two drivers for population growth - natural increase and net migration - are changing. Here, we explore the implications of short and long term demographic trends on population growth around the regions over the next ten years. Read

Budget 2022 was a milestone for the disabled community with the announcement that the Ministry for Disabled People would be established from 1 July. The Government is signalling that the new Ministry marks a move towards a ‘whole-of-life’ approach to disability, rather than viewing it as a ‘health’ issue. Read

A fact that may surprise some New Zealanders is that their life is tracked and monitored by the government from the day they are born until the day they die. Read

The need to understand our changing population has been more important than ever, as an unexpected wave of migration rendered previous projections obsolete. This article explores how this migration wave changed our population, and our view of the future. Read

Back in August we noted that Auckland city (the urban area defined by Stats NZ) has as many people as the next 12 cities combined. We also showed a map dividing Auckland up into 12 areas with equivalent populations to the cities. Unfortunately, the map is now out of date as Stats NZ revised their population estimates in October. Read

Economic growth, inflation, and interest rates around the globe remain significantly lower than they were prior to the 2008 Global Financial Crisis. The limited success of efforts to stimulate the economy over the last 12 years are reminiscent of the Japanese economy’s stagnation during the 1990s. Are other developed economies, including New Zealand, at risk of suffering the same malaise as Japan over the medium-term? Read

The latest estimated resident population data for regions and districts published by Statistics New Zealand (Stats NZ) in late October threw up a few surprises, not least that Auckland’s population is a lot lower than previously estimated. Indeed, we have been overestimating population in many of our larger urban centres and underestimating it in the smaller provincial districts. Read

Every time we have local elections there is lots of talk about the low levels of turnout, and rightly so. In 2016, turnout was up nationally to an unimpressive 42%. The 2019 preliminary results from Local Government NZ show a drop in national turnout to 41.4%. At a slightly more detailed level, “metro” council areas followed a similar zigzag of up in 2016 and down in 2019. Interestingly “provincial” and “rural” council areas showed an inverse zigzag, with decreased turnout in 2016 and increased turnout in 2019. Read

Initial releases from the 2018 Census have highlighted the seemingly high number of unoccupied dwellings across the country, particularly the 40,000 ‘ghost houses’ in Auckland. It has been speculated that foreign-based land bankers are behind these ghost houses, having chosen to leave them unoccupied. With a housing shortage and concerning levels of homelessness, particularly in Auckland, this figure raises an obvious question of whether we could be better utilising our existing housing stock. However, once we dive into the data it becomes clear that ghost houses aren’t a big problem – and we simply need to build more houses to address the housing shortage . Read

On 23 September StatsNZ released the first batch of Census 2018 data, which includes high-level national trends, population counts for local areas, and the number of electorates. Although it is great to finally have some 2018 Census data, the information available is still very high level. Read