Oliver is the Executive Director of The New Zealand Initiative. Before joining the Initiative, he was a Research Fellow at the Centre for Independent Studies in Sydney, the Chief Economist at the Policy Exchange in London, and an advisor in the UK House of Lords.
Oliver holds a master's degree in economics and business administration and a PhD in Law from Bochum University in Germany.
Oliver is available to comment on all of the Initiative’s research areas.
Phone: +64 4 499 0790
This week’s Budget confirmed what most New Zealanders already suspected. The government’s finances are tight, the deficit persists, and there is no pot of money waiting to be spent on the country’s problems. Just as well, because government spending never delivers growth or prosperity. Read more
In this episode, Oliver talks with Eric about Budget 2026, which brings the forecast surplus forward a year but rests on a series of lucky breaks, from oil prices falling to fiscal discipline surviving the election and coalition negotiations. They weigh what is driving spending well above 2019 levels, the case for superannuation reform, council incentives to go for growth, the shrinking public service, and why Treasury's tobacco and alcohol excise forecasts keep going wrong. Read more
Wellington (Thursday, 28 May 2026) – The New Zealand Initiative welcomes the Going for Housing Growth Incentive Fund announced in Budget 2026. The Initiative has argued for more than a decade that councils need a direct financial stake in enabling new housing. Read more
1. INTRODUCTION 1.1 The New Zealand Initiative (the Initiative) welcomes the opportunity to submit on the Modern Slavery Bill. Read more
Wellington (Wednesday, 27 May 2026) – New Zealand can be a much more prosperous country, and the policy choices needed to get us there are well within reach, says The New Zealand Initiative’s Executive Director, Dr Oliver Hartwich. The Initiative today released Prescription for Prosperity 2026, its fourth briefing to an incoming government. Read more
This is The New Zealand Initiative’s 2026 Prescription for Prosperity. Since 2017, the Initiative has prepared a briefing for the incoming government. Read more
During the first reading of New Zealand’s Modern Slavery Bill last month, one member of parliament warned it would create perverse incentives to look the other way. Another raised the compliance cost from his experience on an Australian board. Read more
By 1974, at the Allensbach Institute she had founded a quarter-century earlier, Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann had given a name to a puzzle first visible in her election research of the 1960s. West Germans would tell her pollsters one thing in private; in public they would say something else, or nothing at all. Read more
In this episode, Oliver talks with senior fellow John Howard about mounting geopolitical instability, from Iran and the Strait of Hormuz to Trump's visit to Beijing and the growing pressure on Taiwan. They discuss what these crises mean for New Zealand's energy security, political leadership, European security, business risk, and the need for more serious strategic thinking. Read more
Observers of European politics know Germany’s Alternative for Germany (AfD) as a right-wing, populist party, probably extreme, certainly friendly to Russia. Less visible from the outside is that the AfD is not an ordinary opposition party that might win an election, govern badly and then be voted out. Read more
When Jim Chalmers stood up on budget night and announced the end of negative gearing on established properties, he assured Australians it was worth breaking a promise for “right and justifiable reasons.” Grant Robertson, New Zealand’s finance minister, said something remarkably similar in March 2021 when he broke his own promise not to extend the bright-line test on property. Robertson called his earlier commitment “too definitive.” A New Zealand Herald columnist observed that this sounded a lot like “too honest.” New Zealanders know how this story ends. Read more
In this episode, Oliver talks with Roger Partridge about the Government’s decision to legislate to stop the Smith v Fonterra climate change case. They discuss why Parliament was right to step in after the Supreme Court reinstated a claim the Court of Appeal had unanimously struck out, the causation problems at the heart of the case, and why media claims of an attack on judicial independence get New Zealand’s constitutional order backwards. Read more
Ahead of New Zealand’s 2017 election, I floated the idea of a grand coalition between National and Labour in a few columns. The circumstances back then made it appealing. Read more
In this episode, Michael talks to Oliver Hartwich about his new satirical novella The Martian Audit, in which two alien auditors arrive in New Zealand to assess it for invasion, only to find themselves defeated not by weapons but by the country's regulation and bureaucracy. There are no villains, just a country full of friendly people trapped in systems that don't work, from leaky homes and hospital waiting rooms to view shafts you can't legally stop to admire. Read more
A German economist writing satire about New Zealand sounds like the opening line of a bad joke. The joke gets longer when you learn the plot: two Martian auditors land in the Wairarapa expecting humanity at its best, are promptly fined for parking without consent, and proceed on a reluctant tiki tour of the country in the company of a Wellington bureaucrat named Ben, who has quietly decided his career is over and he may as well help them. Read more