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Artist’s rendition of working from New Zealand.
Artist’s rendition of working from New Zealand.

PoliticsJanuary 29, 2025

The best and worst places to work remotely in New Zealand

Artist’s rendition of working from New Zealand.
Artist’s rendition of working from New Zealand.

New Zealand is opening our clean green arms to digital nomads. Here are some directions around our lovely towns, housing crisis and cafe locations.

Hello digital nomads. Luckily for you, our newly minted e​conomic growth minister Nicola Willis has lifted up her pointer finger, flipped her hand around, and is beckoning you over. “New visa rules will put New Zealand boldly on the map as a welcoming haven for the world’s talent,” she said on Monday. All you visiting IT specialists and influencers are now allowed to work in 100% Pure New Zealand for up to nine months, as long as your money is coming from elsewhere. It’s the same old visitor visa with no extra costs, and for 90 days, you won’t be required to declare yourself as a tax resident here.

Don’t act cool. Allegedly, six people are already keen even before any of the $100,000 marketing campaign has been rolled out. That’s good, because immigration minister Erica Stanford wants you to come “right now” possibly to replace the residents who are leaving at record rates.

We know you’re already browsing flights and mid-term accommodation options, so here’s a handy guide to places you should, and shouldn’t, choose to work. 

OK, you can work here

Timaru

On the eastern coast of the South Island sits a little port city called Timaru. It’s got a lovely beach called Caroline Bay, where you can watch a colony of the world’s smallest penguin –  kororā (little blue penguin). I would not recommend swimming unless you get a thick wetsuit. The sky tends to shroud itself in a mysterious grey fog, and last year 655 people lost their jobs with the closure of the meatworks. At least 20 went to Australia. Sad, but the limited other employment opportunities means that more are likely to clear out, leaving space for visitors who bring their employment with them. 

Hobbiton

Hobbiton
An iconic and welcoming location in Middle Earth. (Image: Shaun Jeffers).

The real-life movie set from Lord of The Rings and the other trilogy we prefer not to mention is out among the pastures waiting for you. Just imagine having Frodo’s pantry as your Zoom background. Everyone in the meeting will get so hungry it will finish early and you can pop off to the gift shop.

Wellington

The capital city needs you. With 9,520 (and counting) public servant jobs cut by the current coalition, plus killer bike lanes, Wellington’s cafes have been emptying out and shuttering. The rental market has slowed down, with one property manager claiming to have seen rents decrease by 20%. Please, save our cafe capital, one hazelnut latte at a time.

Raetihi 

In a North Island valley between two National Parks and only 11km away from ski fields is another zombie population-challenged town. Raetihi boasts the Dinosaur House Museum, complete with replicas and documentaries, but not many jobs. A whole 230 jobs were lost when pulp and paper mills closed down, and many people were packing to leave town last October. I can confirm there are at least two cafes in town so it’s the perfect place to BYO job.

Hokitika

The un-official driftwood capital of the world, Hokitika. (Photo: JLDAUSSY via Wikipedia).

A simply lovely seaside town on the West Coast. This part of the South Island boasts “untamed, natural wilderness, authentic experiences and friendly characters”. Hokitika beach is perfectly positioned to view sunsets, and every January hosts a Driftwood and Sand festival. On the edge of town there’s the Glow Worm Dell, and lakes, walks, gorges, forests, zip lines and historical gold mining sites.

Ōhura

The main street may be bestowed with rusty tin and rotting weatherboards, but be sure not to overlook Ōhura. About 120 people live there but there were twice as many in 1996, the year that Telecom launched its first internet offering AKA when the internet arrived in New Zealand. If you want to experience a quintessential rural town, this could be it. It’s built on swamp land, an iconic colonial choice, and has a bustling cosmopolitan club which may or may not have wifi.

Rotorua

Heaps of motels have recently been kicked off a gravy train, so there’s plenty of places to stay. I’ve been told that you simply get used to the rotten egg smell.

A castle in the Coromandel

Abandoned or amazing? (Photo: Trinity Real Estate).

In December, an abandoned castle hit the slowest property market New Zealand has seen in ages. It’s no ordinary castle, but a dream and collaboration by a world-famous-in-New-Zealand architect and a local painter you’ve probably never heard of. It was never completed, but has a turret and sea views so that’s probably all you need. It seems to be unsold, so suuuuurely the vendor would welcome short-term stays. Make sure you hire a four-wheel drive to get there.

Stay away!

Queenstown

I have to warn you against a favoured location of “high-value” tourists such as yourself. Queenstown, the luxe gateway to adventure sports, vineyards, historic mining towns, The Remarkables and Coronet Peak has no houses left. The lack of supply has pushed rents to unimaginable extremes, and has people camping out long-term in cars and vans, and hotels buying other hotels as accommodation for their staff.

Department of Conservation (DOC) huts

Yes, there are super-cute little huts up and down the entire country you can stay in for a dime. Just one problem, there is a citizen-enforced ban on technology unless its high-tech head torches, vortex camping pots and new versions of waterproof fabric.

Auckland

Here’s the SkyTower, now go away. (Photo: elpinto007 via Wikipedia).

You’re likely to land here and my advice is to just keep moving. We’ve only just managed to pass on the crown for having the highest rent in the country (thanks Bay of Plenty) and we’d quite like to not get it back. When Spain introduced a digital nomad-friendly visa in 2023, its big coastal city Barcelona experienced a “quick and extreme case of gentrification” and rents rose 60% in five years, said Barcelona-dweller Marta Bausells to RNZ’s Morning Report. All you need to do here is have a look at our big syringe and move on, thanks.

Fiordland

Yes, it is beautiful, yes, I know you want to go there, but it’s simply not conducive to work that requires only your hands to move. There is something that the stunning photographs of fiords, waterfalls and mountains don’t show. Something not marked on maps and that tourism operators like to exclude from their sales pitches. Millions of tiny black sandflies that will eat you alive and fly into your eyes. They will find any way to get you, including going through the vents of bathroom extraction fans. Oh, and there’s also alpine parrots that would love to take apart your laptop.

Raglan

It’s an official fact that with digital nomads come more trendy cafes. If this happened in Raglan something would break on the time-space continuum. Enough is enough.

Keep going!
Close-up of a finger pressing a "Reset" button on a metallic surface. The image is shaped like an arrow pointing to the right, set against a textured blue background.
Image: The Spinoff

OPINIONBusinessJanuary 29, 2025

Scrapping Callaghan Innovation is a necessary reset. But what comes next?

Close-up of a finger pressing a "Reset" button on a metallic surface. The image is shaped like an arrow pointing to the right, set against a textured blue background.
Image: The Spinoff

As New Zealand’s Crown-owned innovation agency is disestablished, it’s time to ask what the real constraints holding back New Zealand’s economic transformation are, writes Rowan Simpson.

In 2011 the physicist Sir Paul Callaghan, one of New Zealand’s most distinguished scientists and a passionate advocate for economic transformation, gave a landmark speech he called “Sustainable economic growth for New Zealand: An optimistic myth-busting approach”. Many of his observations have become often-repeated mantras of New Zealand’s technology sector, including “be the place where talent wants to live”, “we better be prepared to be good at some pretty weird stuff” (anticipating correctly that the most successful companies would operate in obscure and difficult-to-predict niches) and that “just 100 inspired entrepreneurs could turn this country around”. 

Tragically, Callaghan died of cancer just months later. However, his legacy lived on in a new Crown entity called Callaghan Innovation, established in 2013 with the vague responsibility for “making New Zealand business more innovative” through grants, technical services and business support. The intention was noble – to help transform New Zealand from a country dependent on primary industries to one driven by technology and innovation.

Fast forward to last week: prime minister Christopher Luxon’s state of the nation speech echoed many of those same ideas. At the end, he announced that Callaghan Innovation would be disestablished, with its “most important functions” reassigned elsewhere in the public sector.

Christopher Luxon delivering his state of the nation speech.

For those of us who have built and invested in successful technology companies in New Zealand, this decision is overdue. Despite good intentions, the agency became bogged down in administering grants and subsidies rather than driving real innovation. Under pressure to demonstrate value, it spread its resources thinly across a huge range of activities – from managing R&D tax credits to funding startup accelerator programmes. But there was never any clear evidence that any of these initiatives actually helped create more successful companies.

There’s no question that improving our productivity and growing the economy beyond agriculture and tourism is key to our future prosperity. We’ve understood this for a long time. However, the ambition to be more innovative has never been our problem. The challenge we’ve struggled with all these years is actually doing it in any measurable way. Perhaps we missed a trick? Rather than Callaghan Innovation we should have called it Callaghan Execution.

Having worked with and invested in companies like Trade Me, Xero, Vend and Timely over the past two decades, I’ve seen firsthand what drives growth. The key question is always: What’s the constraint? What’s actually holding us back? As we consider the legacy of Callaghan Innovation, and more importantly think about what will replace it, let’s ask the same question of our economy as a whole.

Here’s an obvious answer: our national obsession with investing in real estate, rather than investing in much more uncertain but ultimately more rewarding productive businesses. Spending more and more borrowed money to buy little bits of our country off each other is a zero-sum game. We might think it’s how we “get ahead”, but it’s actually dragging us down.

Luxon himself exemplifies this – he’s often described as a “businessman”, but his investments after achieving financial success were rental properties, sold for profit years later. What kind of business is that? What value does it create?

Here’s another: our expectation that the government will underwrite business risk, while private shareholders capture the rewards. Founders and executives at early-stage companies spend countless hours pursuing grants, subsidies, R&D credits and development loans – many of which end up written off rather than repaid. Venture funds and “angel investors” expect government co-investment without hard questions. The government venture fund has been tilting at windmills for more than 20 years, with little to show for hundreds of millions invested.

Ask not what you can do for your country, but what your country can do for you, I suppose?

Here’s a third: our dismal savings record, which leaves us constantly looking overseas for investment. In the same speech last week the prime minister announced the creation of Invest New Zealand to “roll out the welcome mat” for foreign investors. But lack of a welcome mat hasn’t constrained our best startups from attracting international investment – companies like Xero, Vend and Rocket Lab have all raised millions offshore. Many of the most promising companies in the next wave of startups are already backed by Australian-based venture capital funds – including Tracksuit, Halter and OpenStar.

The big difference between New Zealand and Australia in this respect is that in recent years large superannuation funds in Australia have become significant investors in their venture capital sector, helping them to scale. In New Zealand we’re at least a generation behind because we’ve been so tentative on compulsory superannuation. If we had to pick one policy prescription to help us close the gap with Australia, matching their settings on this would be a great first step. Is there any politician here brave enough to propose that?

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Duncan Greive
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I applaud the prime minister for turning our attention back to these fundamental questions about New Zealand’s economic future. But aspiration alone is insufficient. What are we actually going to do differently?

Rather than simply targeting “more startups, more IPOs, more inbound foreign investment” – which are inputs – we should understand and measure how startup companies contribute to the broader economy. This means tracking metrics like how much they pay their employees and how much of the capital they raise is spent locally. After all, we don’t tax capital gains in New Zealand, but we do tax operating expenses through PAYE and GST. The only companies that will drive our future prosperity are those that create high-paying local jobs and sustainable growth.

The end of Callaghan Innovation is a necessary reset. While it’s difficult news for those affected, hopefully many of them can find roles working directly for our fastest-growing companies, which are constantly seeking skilled workers, rather than supporting them indirectly. That’s one of our biggest constraints – we need more New Zealanders choosing to work on and invest directly in these businesses. Perhaps then we can move beyond talking about the theoretical benefits of innovation to actually delivering it.

Rowan Simpson is the author of How To Be Wrong: A crash course in startup success. Pre-sales are available now.

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