Independent · Non-partisan · Automated

Is New Zealand getting better? We check the official numbers.

CivicNZ tracks public money, outcomes and promises using official sources only. Every figure has a date and a link, and every party gets the same rules.

Official desks

Read the sourced area desks, not a composite score.

Health, affordability, wellbeing, promises and value-for-money use official series and the same published rules. The NZ Index composite is experimental and is not shown as a national headline.

3 of 5 areas have a live desk · Health · Affordability · Wellbeing

Five areas at a glance

Desk tiles show the published Better / Worse / Flat / Insufficient verdict. Housing and Safety have no live desk, so they say Insufficient — never an Index domain score.

Health

Better

On the latest official series, more tracked topics are better than worse.

Better

Stats NZ · 2026-09-23

Housing

Insufficient

Insufficient — no housing desk. MSD snapshots are on the experimental Index, not a 0–100 tile.

Insufficient

CivicNZ methods

Safety

Insufficient

Insufficient — no safety desk. Methods exclude all four Safety series.

Insufficient

CivicNZ methods

Affordability

Flat

On the latest official series, tracked topics are split — no overall Better or Worse majority.

No clear change

Stats NZ · 2026-10-13

Wellbeing

Flat

Mean life satisfaction is 7.6 out of 10, similar to 7.7 out of 10 in January 2021.

No clear change

Stats NZ · 2024-09-25

Stale · older than 12 months

Health desk

Are we getting healthier?

Official series only. Where we compare groups, we show the raw gap beside the adjusted gap, using measured factors only: age, deprivation, smoking, obesity, diabetes, rurality and access. When the official data doesn't publish both gaps, we don't guess.

Open the health desk

On the latest official series, more tracked topics are better than worse.

Better

Female life expectancy

83.7 years (female)

Stats NZ’s abridged period life table for 2023–2025 gives female life expectancy at birth of 83.7 years and male 80.4 years. Female life ex…

Stats NZ · 2026-02-18

ED wait times

76.3 %

76.3% of patients left ED within six hours in Q4 2025/26, up from 73.9% in the same quarter a year earlier (Health NZ). That missed the 77%…

Health NZ / Te Whatu Ora · 2026-06-30

Stats NZ · 2026-09-23

Promises tracker · 2023–26 term

What was promised, and what's on the record

Coalition commitments, each checked against official sources. "Delivered" is only used for an exact match on legislation.govt.nz.

commitments tracked

verified against a source

delivered in law

not yet verified

Delivered 28 · Verified, not delivered 20 · Unverified 42 · Open the tracker ↗

Coalition agreements and legislation.govt.nz

What changed this week

GETS notices closing this week and new watchdog alerts. Older desk findings stay on their area pages.

Why you can trust it

Official sources only

Stats NZ, Health NZ, MSD, Treasury, public registers and Hansard. Every figure carries a source, a release date and a fetch date.

Evidence ratings

Verified, unverified and delivered are labelled separately. Gaps say "Not published" and are never filled in.

Same rules, every party

Rubrics are published, and party colours are never used to score anyone.

Association ≠ cause

Spend-versus-outcome pairings are labelled as associations. Methods are open on every page.

For researchers, newsrooms and companies

The same data as clean JSON

Free JSON for browsing. Pay-per-call x402 routes for bulk and desk-level data, with no account or subscription.

Free
/index, /health-outcomes/summary, /promises/summary, /affordability/summary

US$0.01
GETS tenders search

US$0.02
officer connections

Read the API docs

# Example shape from the free GETS route
GET https://civiciq-api-production.up.railway.app/government/procurement/tenders?limit=1
{
  "total": 1,
  "tenders": [{
    "description": "GETS notice title",
    "value_label": "Not stated",
    "source": "GETS open data"
  }]
}