a hand holding three certificates (birth, marriage and death) on a grey background

SocietyJune 23, 2025

Your life in three certificates

Community manager
a hand holding three certificates (birth, marriage and death) on a grey background

Work stories from the office of births, deaths and marriages.

On a grey Wellington day, there’s a grey Wellington street, and on that street there’s a grey, medium sized building. Hanging outside this building is a small sign with the vaguest of governmental names. The Department of Internal Affairs. Through the automatic doors, across a bright foyer and up a grey lift, there’s a grey office.

Many years ago I worked there in a small team known as births, deaths and marriages, or as it was affectionately called, hatch, match and dispatch. Myself and a few others issued birth, death and marriage certificates. The process was mostly automated, but there were enough unique cases to justify a team of us parsing through requests and figuring out what was going on. It was a combination of data-entry, customer service and detective work.

On an individual level these certificates are necessary to get a passport, enrol your kids in school, open a bank account, vote in an election or learn your great grandparents’ middle names. At a national level, life event data guides policy, informs public health decisions and tracks demographic shifts.

The head of BDM has the old-timey job title of Registrar-General. Previous Registrar-General Jeff Montgomery stepped down in 2023 after 10 years in the role. One time when he visited our office, he told me there were official robes for the role that are kept at Te Papa. I asked if he had ever tried them on and he said only once, when he first got the job. He may have even mentioned a ceremonial mace. While writing this piece, I asked Jeff about the robes and he told me that he had been joking. 

A smiling man in glasses and a blue shirt with Pacific patterns speaks into a microphone at an event, standing in front of a gray wall and a decorative yellow tapestry.
Jeff trying out some new material

When he wasn’t keeping a straight face, Jeff oversaw all life event registrations, including being the final arbiter on what you could name your baby. As I came to learn, every field on these certificates is contested in some way or another.

Names can’t resemble a title or rank, can’t be swears or include numbers, and can’t ridicule the child. A name has to be around 100 characters or less, but you can change your name as many times as you like. There was a rastafarian-adjacent religion in the bush somewhere that encouraged their followers to regularly change their names to long, pious strings of words. All name changes are recorded on your birth certificate, and it was an exciting day when I got to issue a two-page certificate.

Unlike the days when a leak in the roof or a fire in a local archive could wipe out decades of paper records, the modern system of recording life events in New Zealand has a near 100% coverage. After stepping down, Jeff moved to Fiji to work on registrations in the Pacific. “About 50% of births and 80% of deaths in the Pacific still go unrecorded.” Jeff says. “with considerable variation across the region – from some countries with 100% coverage, to others below 20%.”

He’s working with governments and organisations to move “towards every Pacific Islander having the official recognition they deserve, from birth to death, which really means the chance to fully participate in their societies.”

Records in the New Zealand system go right back to 1840 and while historic personal details were interesting, the attitudes recorded on old records were just as eye-opening. I’d often come across Māori men and women in their 70s with their names registered as “Boy” or “Girl”. At various points, government workers had been sent out to rural areas to register births, but had prioritised speed over recording the child’s name.

Sometimes the details omitted are shocking, other times it’s what is included. Horrible words I had to look up to fully understand. Retarded, cripple, mongoloid. From 1912 it became law to record the “Degree of Māori blood” on birth and death records, which then became standard for over 50 years. The phrases they used were Full Māori or Half-Caste.

On a birth certificate, the field for “parents” is another battleground. The adoptions team sat around the corner from me, and I’d often see redacted details on birth certificates. For closed adoptions before March 1986, birth parents can decide whether or not their details remain hidden on their child’s birth record. The info can stay hidden for up to 10 years, then the birth parents are able to call and renew (known as “endorsing”) the block for another decade.

A colleague told me that for one closed adoption, the restrictions on the parents’ details were due to expire that day (after a 10-year block). The birth parents had called that morning to keep their details hidden, just ahead of their child, who had called in the afternoon to ask who his parents were. The calls were only a few hours apart. 

Three New Zealand birth certificate design options: Standard (plain white background), Forest (lush green forest scene), and Beach (people walking on a beach at sunset). Prices: $33 for Standard, $35 for Forest and Beach.
The three genders.

Wading through the records revealed the complexity of people’s lives. Common historic scenarios were well known in the office. For example, when a young woman got pregnant but wasn’t married she would sometimes be hidden away by her family. They might have said she was sick for a year, or away visiting relatives. Then her parents would announce a surprise baby of their own. Whoops! But in reality, their new child was their grandson. Many decades go past and that child applies for a birth certificate. The system can’t automatically find the record with the details they’ve provided, so it would be bumped to me to figure out what was going on.

In one case, after some searching, I confirmed with my boss that there was an application for a certificate where the customer had put down his grandparents as his parents. “So what happens now?” I asked. “This is how he finds out,” he told me. So I gave him a call.

In my best phone voice I let the customer know that I couldn’t find any birth certificates with the details he supplied.

“Oh yea.” 

Are there any other details they could be under? 

“Nah.” 

Is there a chance your sister could have been your mother? 

“Yea could have been.” 

Let me take a look (fake typing in the background to make it sound like I was searching). Oh yea there’s a record here, looks like your sister is your birth mother. 

“Oh yea.”

I’ll send this birth certificate out to you now then 

“OK.” 

Anything else I can help you with? 

“No thanks, bye.”

He didn’t sound surprised, but clearly was not a man of many words. Maybe he always knew. Or maybe it was the kind of all hands on deck family where it just didn’t matter (I could see that his sister/mother had died a number of years prior). Like many of the older people I spoke to, it was his first time applying for a birth certificate, so that he could get a passport to visit the grandkids in Australia.

‘He mea tautoko nā ngā mema atawhai. Supported by our generous members.’
Liam Rātana
— Ātea editor

While chatting to customers I would hear, in the background, young babies crying, grieving widows and wedding planning. In some countries you can only get married in a church or authorised venue, but in Aotearoa you can wed anywhere on land or at sea. Some marriage certificates have locations like “On a boat 20km off the coast of Whakatāne” or “Tarn Bivvy”. To be fair, you’re also allowed to be born and die anywhere you like. In another rare lack of bureaucracy, you don’t need to legally change your name when you get married. You can hyphenate, take your partner’s surname, or keep the one you had. Most places will accept a marriage certificate as proof of a new surname.

Birth certificates are often ordered by parents for their child. Death certificates are often ordered by children for their parents. Some of my long-serving colleagues (since retired) recognised unusual surnames, and would marvel at the fragments of family stories that they had seen play out over many years. After I left I got married and had kids, and wondered if anyone in the office noticed.

Every piece of information on a birth, death or marriage record has been contentious, regressive, or breaking new ground at some point. From adoption details, to social change like marriage equality, to new frontiers like throuples wanting to all be on a birth certificate. Life records are a colourful space. At the centre of it all is a grey public service office, on any grey Wellington day, printing certificates.

Keep going!
a picture of Auckland at night with the illuminated light path and the sky tower in the background
Lighting at night can attract people to spaces, or drive them away. (Image: The Spinoff)

SocietyJune 23, 2025

Brighter isn’t always better: How lighting plays a crucial role in making cities feel safe

Contributing writer
a picture of Auckland at night with the illuminated light path and the sky tower in the background
Lighting at night can attract people to spaces, or drive them away. (Image: The Spinoff)

In New Zealand and Australia, public spaces at night are often lit by lots of bright overhead lights illuminating the ground. Lighting designer Tim Hunt tells Shanti Mathias why this isn’t always ideal. 

As a lighting designer, Tim Hunt has gone on dozens of night walks with clients across New Zealand, Australia and Indonesia. Every time, he says, he learns something new. “I was walking with 30 women through an alleyway – it looked dingy and a bit suspect,” he says. He asked them what could improve the space, and they suggested lighting the doorways, so it was easier to tell what kind of space was around them. “As a lighting designer, I couldn’t have thought of that,” he says now. What’s more, lighting doorways isn’t called for in the guidelines consulted by city councils and corporate developers. 

Hunt, a New Zealander based in Australia, works for the design agency Arup. The group has just undertaken a research project looking at how lighting creates the perception of safety – or not – for women and girls at night. What they’ve learned, Hunt says, is that the accepted wisdom isn’t always true. 

“City centres use pole lights and flood lights – the logic is that brighter is always better,” he says. But that doesn’t always hold true. Using data from Free to Be, an app where women can record their experiences in cities, the Arup designers and a team from Monash University found that lighting was a frequent feature in incidences of women feeling unsafe. But not just any lighting: light that was too bright or too harsh felt unsafe, creating stark shadows and areas that need to be avoided.

a group of people shining lights at the wall
Night walks are a chance for lighting designers to understand how other people experience the night. (Photo: Supplied)

Think of it like this: would you rather walk through a courtyard that has some patches of bright light, and some of strong shadows? Or a space where multiple, dimmer lights overlap? “Going from bright to dark, bright to dark – that’s a poor experience,” says Hunt. Strong overhead lighting means that your eyes can’t adjust to seeing what is in the shadows. 

Lighting plans measure lux levels, which quantify brightness. But those measurements are of what hits the ground, not what is around a place. “Tarmac is dark, and it’s hard to make it feel bright,” Hunt says. “It’s light in the distance that can reveal spaces so that people feel safe, but that’s not what we’re asked to do as an industry.” When walking at night, most people prefer to be aware of their surroundings, not just seeing the path ahead of them. The official New Zealand and Australian lighting standards for public spaces have minimum lux levels that cities have to adhere to, but not maximums. 

The generally accepted wisdom is that more lighting can prevent crime – but that’s really hard to quantify, especially because lighting isn’t separate from other environmental factors. That’s why they choose to focus on perception of safety, Hunt says, because it’s easier to examine how different lighting set-ups in the same place make people feel more at ease. Many times when someone feels unsafe at night – having someone behind them who may or may not be following them, not being able to see the faces of people at a train station entrance – no particular crime has occurred, and there’s unlikely to be an official record. 

a dark street with lots of shadows and a single streetlight
Badly designed lighting creates stronger shadows which people will seek to avoid

Fear of harm at night, even if it’s relatively unlikely, affects many more people than harm actually does. “Where lighting is can affect your decision to use public transport or not, where you go at night, and how you get there,” Hunt says. Recent research from the Helen Clark Foundation shows that only 45% of women feel safe walking alone at night in New Zealand, compared to 71% of men. And while the stereotype of activity at night is people going out to events or restaurants, in winter it can get dark by 5pm; people have to navigate dark streets on the way home from work, or the way to work if they do shifts. 

When done well, lighting can make a difference. Work under way in the Auckland suburb of Avondale to improve lighting, install CCTV and revitalise the main street with a community centre and library has been celebrated as making it a more pleasant place to be. Upgrades to Wellington’s waterfront lighting last year used lights on buildings as well as poles to make it easier for walkers, cyclists and scooter-users to traverse the area at night. 

Lighting has to work with human biology – our crucial sense of sight and ability to open pupils wider to see in the dark – and psychology. Hunt has had people tell him, for instance, that they feel safe when they’re in a place that seems “loved”. “I’ve gone on night walks and asked people to shine their torches on the wall, then at the ground,” he says. Almost everyone prefers the ambient lighting bouncing off a lighter wall to light directed at the dark floor. “Then I say, ‘that won’t meet the lighting standards’.”

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There are other reasons to rethink lighting standards. Artificial light can have an effect on plants and animals. Seabirds, bats and wētā can get confused, like the tītī in Kaikōura who crash into the road, mistaking it for the sea. As well as the way that ecosystems are affected, using too much light in the wrong places also represents wasted energy. The blurry light pollution you experience in cities, a haze that conceals the stars, is all made of light bouncing into the sky, energy going where it doesn’t need to at all. 

Changing lighting is expensive. Hunt points out that the design of street lamps – light on a stick – was developed when streets were lit by costly gas lamps, which had to be individually ignited each night. Modern lighting doesn’t have to mean big bulbs: it can be smaller, fitted into other infrastructure like a park bench or a bus stop. Over the past decade, many councils in New Zealand have changed sodium light bulbs for more efficient, and sometimes shielded, LEDs, which can be dimmed or change colour temperature. The results can be striking, even if the design continues to use overhead streetlights. 

People feeling safe at night is ultimately good for the economy, meaning more people might engage with local businesses at night, attend events or use public transport – services cities are also investing in. To Hunt, that’s all the more reason for cities and developers to think about how to make everyone feel safe at night. “Darkness [averages] 12 hours of the day, half the year – yet lighting is still treated like an afterthought.” 

‘Become a member to help us deliver news and features that matter most to Aotearoa.’
Lyric Waiwiri-Smith
— Politics reporter

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