Joseph Hatch (c. 1837 – 2 September 1928) was a New Zealand politician who is best remembered for the harvesting of penguins and elephant seals for their oil on the sub-Antarctic Macquarie Island from 1890 to 1919.

Hatch's gang started with sea elephant bulls in 1887, but in 1889 with fewer bulls and the Norwegian development of a steam-pressure digestor which could extract oil from meat and bone as well as blubber and from smaller animals like penguins, Hatch realised the financial potential from harvesting the penguins on Macquarie Island.

Hatch had a legal dispute with his captain, Jacob Eckhoff, over his ship, and there were three shipwrecks around the island (Gratitude, 1898; Clyde and Jessie Nichol 1910) with 20 deaths.

By 1919 objections culminated in perhaps the first-ever international campaign to preserve wildlife, with Antarctic explorers like Douglas Mawson, Frank Hurley and Apsley Cherry-Garrard, supported by H. G. Wells in his story The Undying Fire and Baron Walter Rothschild.

Hatch had supporters in New Zealand as well, including his fellow Southland politician Sir Joseph Ward and the Tasmanian state government in Australia.