Kiwi Performance Indicators (KPI.nz) Goes Live with New Zealand's Top 10 Issues

Health professionals check our vital signs.

The best businesses produce monthly reports.

And now the biggest operation of all – running our country – has a high-performance dashboard too, www.KPI.nz.

We believe this is also the first time that data has been aggregated across the three research companies that regularly poll and publish the issues that matter most: IPSOS, Curia, and Essential.

The top 10 issues revealed by KPI.nz are as follows:

Cost of Living is unanimously the #1 concern in the country right now.
Economy
Healthcare
Crime
Housing
Taxes
Poverty
Environment
Education
Social Unity - although this is not measured consistently, three different polls from 1News Verian, NZ Herald Dynata, and The Guardian Essential suggest social cohesion is a significant and rising challenge for the country.

Full methodology

Accompanying each issue is an interactive key performance indicator (KPI) that allows voters to see objectively, for the first time, how well Labour-led vs National-led governments have performed over time.

Data is meticulously sourced from trusted Government departments such as Stats NZ, the Reserve Bank, Treasury, NZ Police, Te Whatu Ora/Health New Zealand, and the Ministries of Social Development, Education, and the Environment. Regular updates will be provided as new information becomes available. For total transparency, data sources and notes are also provided.

“KPIs are critical for the success of small businesses I help, so I’ve always found it strange that the biggest business of all – New Zealand – didn’t have its own high-performance dashboard,” says Geoff Neal, one of the creators of Kiwi Performance Indicators.

“We hear political parties bicker all the time about who does it better, so I felt it was time to create some objective measures that allow Kiwis to make their own informed judgments based on hard data, not biased debate.”

It seems so obvious now that it’s live, but why hasn’t our country had a performance dashboard like this before? Why doesn’t each ministry/department/portfolio area?

Asked about what’s next for KPI.nz, Neal says, “We’ve built this as an asset for all of New Zealand to help raise awareness, accountability, ambition, and, ultimately, achieve better results for all of our futures - to walk our talk. But this is also just the start. With more support from fellow Kiwis, we’d love to add more KPIs, especially for areas that are harder to measure, like social unity, poverty, and the environment. Health KPIs are particularly disappointing; the only data series we could find over many years and successive governments were childhood immunisations.”

Stay up-to-date with New Zealand’s latest KPIs by signing up via the homepage to receive new releases as soon as they’re available.