Local authority statistics: March 2025 quarter – information release
12 June 2025
Local authority statistics provides information on the performance of core non-trading activities of New Zealand’s territorial and regional councils.
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Electronic card transactions: May 2025 – information release
12 June 2025
The electronic card transactions (ECT) series cover debit, credit, and charge card transactions with New Zealand-based merchants. The series can be used to indicate changes in consumer spending and economic activity.
Key facts
All figures are seasonally adjusted unless otherwise specified.
Values are at the national level and are not adjusted for price changes.
May 2025 month
Changes in the value of electronic card transactions for the May 2025 month (compared with April 2025) were:
Visit our website to read this information release and to download CSV files:
Fresh insights from Cotality NZ’s Mapping the Market report reveal earlier signs of a pick-up for standalone houses than townhouses, as the national housing market shows fresh signs of stabilisation.
The government’s decision to sanction Israeli cabinet ministers is a cynical diversionary gesture, according to the Palestine Solidarity Network Aotearoa.
New Zealand has joined the UK, Australia, Canada, and Norway in banning the entry of Israel’s Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich and National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir.
PSNA Co-Chair, Maher Nazzal, says the just announced move is simply to placate New Zealanders angry at the government’s complicity with the mass killing of Palestinians and deliberate starvation of Occupied Gaza.
“The New Zealand government statement was quite explicit that the sanctions were ‘not designed to sanction the wider Israeli government’ of which Ben-Gvir and Smotrich are ministers.”
“The New Zealand government's official statement is laying the blame for Israeli barbarity on just two ministers. Our government is pretending that they alone are responsible for the military violence in the Gaza Strip, and Israel's annexation of Palestinian land, expanding settlements, and forced displacement.”
“All these war crimes are supported and stated by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his government. These measures are all being carried out by the Israeli government. These two ministers are quite rabid, but they are not just freelancers or ‘bad apples’.”
“Netanyahu himself is wanted for trial on war crimes charges, so why does he escape the travel ban?”
Nazzal says Ben-Gvir and Smotrich would never plan to come to New Zealand anyway.
“The last time such an individual visited in 2006 the Auckland District Court issued a warrant for his arrest to face war crime charges.” (That was Israeli General Moshe Ya’alon – the ‘Butcher of Qana’. The warrant was quashed by the then Attorney-General Michael Cullen)
“Even if the government sanctioned the entire Israeli cabinet, it would be meaningless.”
“Israel has made Gaza hell on earth for Palestinians, and is making it worse by the hour. We should be cutting trade ties – including military technology, which might be finding its way to Israel, or sending up satellites from Mahia used by Israel to spy on Gaza.
“New Zealand has bilateral agreements with Israel over science and movie-making. They should stop.”
“The government needs to ban Israeli soldiers coming here for genocide holidays, instead of Winston Peters going out of his way to welcome them.”
“And it goes without saying that the Israeli ambassador should be booted out.”
Nazzal says the forced starvation in Gaza has reached a crisis point.
“The choice for the international community is stark. Let tens of thousands starve to death in the next few weeks, or impose a no-fly zone over Gaza and provide military protection for UNRWA aid convoys.”
“In that context, by limiting the travel options for two Israeli politicians our government feels like it’s conveying a message of “Look busy – New Zealanders are angry, we must be seen to be doing something, but really, we don’t care.”
Maher Nazzal
Co-Chair PSNA
New Zealand Council of Trade Unions Te Kauae Kaimahi Secretary Melissa Ansell-Bridges has taken the pay equity fight to the International Labour Organisation (ILO) conference in Geneva, Switzerland. The ILO is a United Nations agency whose mandate is to advance social and economic justice by setting international labour standards.
“I spoke about the recent pay equity changes at the ILO to highlight that Christopher Luxon’s Government has abandoned what was world-leading pay equity legislation,” said Ansell-Bridges.
“It was important to inform the 187 member states that despite not being signalled in the last election, reforms to severely undermine the legislation were passed under urgency without any consultation with workers or their unions.
“Overnight this world-leading system was gutted and what remained in its place is a series of roadblocks, impossible thresholds and obstacle courses masquerading as pay equity.
“180,000 workers, mostly women, many of whom are some of the most vulnerable and lowest paid workers in New Zealand, had their claims cancelled and years of work thrown away.
“Our response to massive undervaluation of pay in female-dominated industries must be how do we fix this, not how do we shirk these costs, having benefited so long from underpaying women.
“We could once be proud on the world stage for making progress towards correcting this blatant sexism – it is shameful that we now have a government that has such low regard for the right to be free from gender discrimination.
“I assured the conference that the union movement in Aotearoa New Zealand will continue to push for a genuine pay equity system and will not rest until women’s work is properly valued and workers everywhere are paid equitably regardless of their gender,” said Ansell-Bridges.
Source: World Vision
Rangatahi across New Zealand are gearing up to tackle a range of unique tasks for the World Vision 40 Hour Challenge this weekend (13-15 June).
The nation’s largest youth fundraising event kicks off this weekend and is encouraging participants to go offline for 40 hours to raise funds for hungry children in Solomon Islands.
A rite of passage for young New Zealanders, the World Vision 40 Hour Challenge, gives rangatahi a platform to champion important causes and raise funds for those in need, while putting themselves to the test with a unique or difficult challenge.
There is no shortage of creativity in the challenges that will be undertaken for 40 hours this weekend, including:
This year ’s World Vision 40 Hour Challenge is calling on youth to give up technology and go “offline for 40 Hours” to unplug, disconnect, and get together with their fri
Source: Choose Clean Water – Tom Kay
A select committee report released today demonstrates Coalition parties support law changes that would prevent local government from being able to control pollution even when it is causing serious harm, say freshwater campaigners.
“The damage these changes would cause must not be underestimated. This is not only an attack on the health of our environment but also democracy as the proposals seek to give greater power to polluting industries and write local government out of regulating harmful pollution of freshwater,” says Choose Clean Water spokesperson Tom Kay.
“It beggars belief when you consider that the National-led Government came to power claiming to be champions of localism – they’ve thrown that out the window completely.”
For freshwater, two parts of the Environment Select Committee report are most significant; the proposals on Section 70 of the Resource Management Act and changes to farm plans, including more Ministerial control.
Currently, Section 70 says that councils cannot allow pollution that would cause “significant adverse effects on aquatic life” as a permitted activity. This means regional councils cannot allow for potentially polluting activities to happen without them going through a consenting process to assess whether they can avoid, remedy, or mitigate their impacts, even where an environment they want to operate in might already be polluted.
The Coalition parties support doing away with this and allowing polluting activities to go ahead, as long as the place those activities are occurring is already polluted and as long as there will be some reduction in that pollution over time.
“But it doesn’t make sense. It is laughable that the report suggests you could grant a consent for an activity to add pollution to a place or continue polluting it now as long as it reduces its pollution by a bit, later. Why would we say ‘We’ll make a waterbody really sick now so we can nurse it back to health over decades’!? Make it make sense.”
Even with standards for these permitted activities, campaigners regional councils will struggle to ensure they are sufficient to reduce or avoid “significant adverse effects on aquatic life” and will face significant lobbying to minimise any standards.
“This opens the door to more and worse pollution. Pollution that harms aquatic life inevitably has an impact on human lives, either directly due to illness or through impacts on livelihoods or taking away the things with love about the places we live in.”
The Coalition parties in the select committee also support changes that would bypass regional councils' role in controlling pollution through farm plans.
Farm plans have been a largely unsuccessful attempt to reduce the impact of farming on the country’s freshwater over the last decade or more. In regions where they have been used, like Canterbury, they have been found to be unable to stop the degradation of communities’ waterways and drinking water sources.
“Not only is the value of farm plans in controlling pollution highly questionable,” says Kay, “the Select Committee’s proposal is to give Government the ability to support farm plans written and audited by polluting industries rather than regional councils, and to allow the Minister for the Environment to make the decision on which industry groups can play this role. This keeps regional councils at arms length from attempts to control pollution through farm plans, effectively writing them out as regulator.”
“This Government has demonstrated it has close and inappropriate relationships with some industry bodies. Having a Minister be responsible for such a decision opens the door to undue influence and allows for industry to capture the whole process around farm plans. We’re watching it happen now. This proposal effectively writes local government out of their regulatory role of controlling pollution.”
“It has never been clearer that the National-led Government is working for the polluters and not for the public. Our communities will pay for this through the impact on our quality of life, our drinking water sources, our opportunities to swim or fish, our pride in our beautiful environment, and our ability to be involved in local decision making.”
