Brick veneer is the long-life default. Maintenance-free for practical purposes, fire-resistant, and well-understood by every NZ inspector you'll ever deal with. The trade-offs are weight (your foundation specifier may have opinions), the cost premium over alternatives, and the visual register — modern architecture rarely calls for a full brick wrap.
Weatherboard — bevel-back, rusticated, board-and-batten — is the kiwi vernacular. Looks right almost everywhere south of the Bombay Hills, and on the right detail will outlast most of the buildings around it. Maintenance is real: paint cycles, inspection, replacement of weathered boards. Cedar weatherboard is a different proposition again — beautiful, expensive, and not low-maintenance unless you commit to a strict oil schedule.
Plaster (whether on a cavity-back AAC block, polystyrene panel, or fibre cement substrate) is where most of the leaky-building problems of the late '90s and early '00s lived. Modern plaster systems on a properly designed cavity drainage detail are perfectly fine; what you don't want is a face-fixed plaster system on a building with no eaves and no cavity. Ask your architect what the drainage detail looks like in section.
EIFS (exterior insulation finish system) gets you a strong R-value at the cladding line and a smooth, continuous finish. Good in the right hands; not forgiving of poor flashing detailing. The same caveats as plaster apply.
Fibre cement weatherboard or panel (James Hardie's Linea, Stria, Axon, etc.) sits in the middle: cheaper than cedar, more dimensionally stable than timber, lower maintenance than plaster. Fine for most house-and-land applications, less convincing on architectural sites where the texture matters.
What you can't do at the cladding-decision stage is shortcut the eaves, cavity and flashing decisions. Get those right and almost any cladding system works. Get them wrong and the most expensive cladding in the country won't save you.