I find it cooler indoors in New Zealand during the winter than I did in the UK for this reason. NZ pretends it’s always warm and has little home insulation, or none in my house, except the ceiling which I did. New Zealand has very poor housing.
Going from 30°C weather to 12°C isn't a great start, but then the otherwise-decent hotel had single glazed windows, which the maid would open every morning. The only heater in the room was an electric resistance one attached to the wall.
In offices, most of the foreigners on the trip were wearing coats and other extra layers.
Young people walking around seemed to be happy in shorts and t-shirt. My conclusion was that New Zealanders are tough, outdoors people, and haven't upgraded their building insulation regulations from whatever they inherited from Britain.
Most private houses also have efficient heat-pumps in at least one room, I could never work out why we still use aluminum window frames though over normal uPVC, which are still not even an option in most new builds.
Personally I would ban resistive heating, they are generally in lower cost rentals, student properties etc and cost a lot for the tenant to use especially as these tenants are generally at the poorer side of the fence.
Stayed in some really cold crappy holiday homes in the south island one we had to leave the electric stove/oven on full to get it to bearable!
You mean the radiant / bar heater type ones? I cannot agree with this, while I agree that they're expensive to run and inefficient for heating rooms / whole house, they do work well if you use them to directly heat only the part of the room you're in.
I've lived in old houses where the ceilings are too high to effectively heat via convection (e.g. a modern 5x5x2.4 room is 60m^3 volume, while an old house with the same width and length but 3.6 metre ceilings is 90m^3 of volume to heat - combine that with inferior ceiling insulation common in old houses and the fact that hot air rises, the space often cools faster than the convection heater can keep up) and there was no natural gas service, so we just had to sit in front of radiant heaters.
I now live in the U.K. and although house quality and insulation is appalling compared to other places it is still infinitely warmer here in the middle of winter than in South Africa.
Coldest I have ever been was going back to visit family during winter there. My wife, who is from Germany and used to -5 to -10 in winter, would take a lot of persuading to visit South Africa in the middle of winter again.