Auckland Mayor Len Brown says it's time for a national debate about the distribution of New Zealand's population and has suggested perhaps the Prime Minister could be involved.
Brown's comments came during a public discussion on population trends.
Central to the discussion was the way in which Auckland's population is growing much faster than the rest of the country's. Some among the audience questioned whether it needed to be accepted that Auckland's population would just keep growing much faster than that of the rest of the country and argued that it could be time to seek to distribute the population more evenly.
Brown used the occasion to launch a strong defence of the Auckland Council's decision to project in its draft Unitary Plan that Auckland's population would grow by about 1 million people during the next 30 years. See our articles about the Unitary Plan here.
The 1 million population growth projection has attracted some criticism as it uses the "high" projection estimated by Statistics New Zealand as opposed to the "medium" projection, which would be for growth of 700,000 over the same period.
Brown produced data showing that between 1986 and 2011 Auckland actually averaged 2.2% population growth per year, while the Statistics NZ "high" projection for the next 30 years works out at an average growth rate of 1.8% each year.
“The key part of this discussion is, first as a united city there are some things that we can’t hide from and what we are doing through this [Unitary Plan] process and what we’ve been doing really for the first two and a half years [of a unified Auckland] is holding a mirror up to ourselves on a whole rage of fronts but in particular we are holding a mirror up in terms of the truth of what our city is.
“And the truth is that we have been growing above the projected high statistical assessments and projections of NZ Stats – significantly higher. And that is it.
“And so the issue of how we confront that and whether or not that will change – the last 30 years have said it hasn’t changed, if anything it continues to grow at above projections, the high projections that we put in the Auckland Plan.
“So, if you were to look at that you would say, it’s not unreasonable that we should set a high projected rate of population growth in this city at 1.8% at the very least to be prudent.
Brown said that based on current projections about 65% of the country's population growth would be in Auckland during the next 25 years.
“Let us not hide from what is clearly evident about our city. Confront the truth and confront the challenges that truth brings.
“…The only other way that you can have any sort of change on this is for the nation to make a clear and determined decision that we need to spread the population around and that is a much, much broader debate.”
Asked later specifically about the concept of having population growth more evenly spread around the country, Brown said it was time the country had a debate on the issue.
“Unless you actually ballast the provincial towns and regions with jobs outside of the farming community and assist them to build economic growth and development to create jobs that would attract either those within our city or secondly those coming in from other countries looking for opportunity Auckland is the only show in town.
“…The country is due for another genuine discussion about how we might share the benefits of our population around better and more equitably and it might be worth that discussion with the Prime Minister and his government to see whether they would sponsor such a discussion to the benefit of those in our community for a better understanding of our role and secondly I think it also heads off some latent or even quite overt antagonism around the rest of the country toward we JAFAs in terms of how quickly we grow, purportedly at the expense of them.
“This is always a debate that was coming, and I think that Auckland’s uniting has just really not only held up a mirror to ourselves but the nation generally and suggests that it’s timely to have a discussion. What the outcome might be, I don’t know, but it would be at the very least useful in terms of how we build the nation forward.”
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