Oliver Hartwich: NZ Initiative Executive Director on their report looking at the progress New Zealand has made since 1970
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What progress has New Zealand made since 1970?
New Zealand Initiative, new report. They've been looking at our economy, tracking our success across more than 100 measures. Say, road deaths, for example, have fallen dramatically over the decades. Smoking rates down formidably. Productivity, though, a bit of a problem.
How have road deaths and life expectancy changed over the decades?
Oliver Hartwich, Dr Oliver Hartwich, New Zealand Initiative Executive Director, one of the authors of this report, is with us. Oliver, morning.
Good morning, Mike. Overall, are we winning or not? We're both. I mean, on some measures, we're improving dramatically. On other measures, we're still lagging the world behind. If you look at road deaths, you mentioned we had more than 800 fatalities on our roads in the 1970s. That's down to under 300, still too many I think, but it's a success story nevertheless because we've got way more traffic and way more people. Infant mortality has equally collapsed. We now have also better connectivity. We have more mobile phone connections than we have people in this country. So some things are improving all the time. On other measures, of course, housing affordability, for example, but also productivity. It's a different story.
So what about life expectancy, for example? Of course, it's getting better and better. But is that our story or is that basically the Western world story? We've gone along with everyone else.
I think it's the latter. I think we're going along with everybody else because we know we have better nutrition these days. We have better medical care. We have better pharmaceuticals available. So in a way, we're just doing what the rest of the world is also doing. But still, the result is that life expectancy is improving dramatically. What we also see, of course, is a massive demographic shift. In the 1970s, the median age was 25 years, meaning half the population under 25, half the population over 25 years of age. That is now 38 years, which is still relatively young by developed world standards. but it is a massive increase in ageing.
Interesting. You talk about productivity and the gap to Australia and places like it. The Resource Management Act, you say, 1991, made a bad situation worse, and generally upsetting people is not something that politicians do anymore, hence we are in the quandary we're in, and yet you isolate out Stanford and her education reform as being an example of big, bold, and getting on with it, almost like the Douglas era. So is that our conundrum? We don't Douglas the way we used to?
I think that's exactly right. What really stands out about all the improvements that we've tracked is actually these improvements almost happen automatically. We have fewer deaths on the roads because our cars are getting safer, for example. Well, that doesn't require any great reformist politician. And of course, we're living longer because our medicines are getting better. And again, this is something that just happens automatically automatically. where we're stagnating or going backwards are usually those issues where it would demand bold reformers to actually improve a situation. We haven't really had them, with a few exceptions, like Erica Stanford on education. She's doing... a remarkable job turning around the curriculum, the assessment system.
She's getting into teacher education soon. So she's actually making a real difference that we will probably see in the statistics in the year to come.
What are the significant challenges New Zealand faces in education and housing?
Yeah, good stuff. Nice to talk to you, Oliver. Oliver Hartwich out of the New Zealand Initiative. Australia now squeezes $77 for every hour of work. Britain is $68. New Zealand is not quite $50. And Australia now produces more than half as much again as the New Zealand one. And if that doesn't worry you, nothing does.
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