Academics are urging politicians to stop treating demography as background noise and start treating it as core national planning requiring cross-party collaboration.
A new report suggests New Zealand’s rapidly changing demographic make-up has reached a critical point.
Within decades, a quarter of all New Zealanders could be 65 or older – a situation unheard of in our history.
In the 1960s, there were seven people aged 15-64 (those who pay the most tax) for every person over-65. In 2025, it was four to one, and in 2065, it is forecast to be two to one.
At the same time, migration patterns are shifting, cities like Auckland are absorbing most growth, and regional decline is accelerating.
The Koi Tū Centre for Informed Futures report argues these trends can no longer be managed as separate issues – we need a national population strategy to link housing, health, infrastructure, and economic policy.
Sir Peter Gluckman and emeritus professor Paul Spoonley co-authored the new report titled People, Place and Prosperity: The Case for a Population Strategy.
“New Zealand now faces a pivotal decision regarding our demographic trajectory,” the report, released today by the Koi Tū Centre for Informed Futures, said.
Spoonley told The Front Page that New Zealand needs a population strategy now because the country is changing fast and the effects will become much more visible by the 2030s.
“If we don’t do it now, we are gonna get slammed by some of the big changes that are beginning to occur.
“We don’t know what New Zealand’s gonna look like in 10 or 20 years, so why don’t we do it now?
“The last time we had anything as seismic and as significant as this was the Baby Boomer arrival between 1945 and 1964.
“The Baby Boomers really changed this country, as they did with many other countries, and we experienced what was called a ‘demographic dividend’. The very large numbers entering the education system and then entering the workforce.
“We need to flip that around now and understand that we are not going to see large numbers of people entering our education system or our workforce over the coming decades,” he said.
New Zealand is heading towards fewer births, a larger older population, and a shrinking pipeline of workers, he said.
“In terms of the current decade, there’s going to be almost 40,000 fewer children in our primary school sector. That’s a result of declining fertility.
“That drop in fertility is going to have a very significant impact, firstly on education and then on the available workforce,” he said.
The country is moving from one where fewer than 10% of people were over-65 to one where about 25% will be over-65 within a couple of decades.
Spoonley says “hyper ageing” in smaller towns and rural communities will put heavy pressure on healthcare, superannuation, aged care, and local infrastructure.
“Do we have the resources and facilities in those communities for an ageing population? For example, do we have a dementia unit? Do we have aged care? Do we have social facilities that enable older people to engage with different generations, different communities?
“When you start asking those questions, you realise that New Zealand has talked about ageing, has done some things about ageing, but there are big, big gaps.
“What we see is the facilities increasingly in our main centres, in our metropolitan centres. Then these smaller communities, which are ageing much faster, we really don’t have the resources and the services and the infrastructure that will help an ageing community,” he said.
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