Northland MP and New Zealand First leader Winston Peters has leapt to the defense of the regions against the Maxim Institute’s claim that declining communities should ‘exit’.
He said Maxim were “peddlers of failed economic policy, which has run a ruler over the country and decided 44 out of 67 territorial authorities could be on the cusp of decline and suggests ‘communities’ should make a decision to ‘exit’ or not.”
The institute forgot that governments had failed in the fundamentals of economic policy to ensure the wealth creators – regional exporters – had their fair share of wealth returned to them, he said.
“That’s why New Zealand’s inflated dollar, admitted by most economic economists, continues on unaddressed. Even the IMF has pointed this out, but when you are on the big city consumption tap governments refuse to act.”
“Despite the regions creating much of the wealth of this country, the high dollar and failure of infrastructural investment means they are losing ground.
It is regional New Zealand that tourists flock to, yet the government fails to return the bulk of its GST receipts to those areas and pays lip service to tourism infrastructural needs.
Southland, with 3 per cent of the population, produces about 18 per cent of exports, but you don’t see BMWs, Audis and Mercedes cramming the streets of Invercargill.
“These regional New Zealand doomsayers are parked up in the big cities and simply have no plan for the regions, or for that matter, New Zealand. They want smart growth, whatever that is supposed to mean.
Perhaps they should explain why they defend a stupid, unfocused immigration policy that is bringing in tens of thousands of older people.
They say regional development policy is an easy way for politicians to spend a lot of money for mostly political gain.
So road building in the regions is for votes, and motorways around Auckland is for exactly what?
“Clearly these influence peddlers are aligned to the National Party, as they were once to Rogernomics and Ruthanomics.
The real test as to whether they have any economic credibility is their abysmal failure to admit that two per cent of our economic growth is purely driven by immigration, while they ignore all its attendant costs. It’s that sort of thinking that got us into this mess, which is why they cannot be trusted to get us out of it.”
New Zealand is already feeling the effects of an oncoming wave of economic and demographic change.
Over the next 30 years our main centres and areas close by will continue to grow, albeit with ageing populations. For the remainder of the country, the populations of 44 out of 67 Territorial Authorities will either stop growing or start to decline. If we do not attend to this divergence of economic and demographic outcomes, we risk opening the door to broader societal division between people and communities in growing areas and those in stagnation or decline.
Rethink #1: All regional development goals be explicitly and clearly stated to enable clarity, transparency, scrutiny and co-ordination. As part of this “regional wellbeing indicators” should be explicitly developed and included in these regional development goals.
Rethink #2: Regional development goals need to be ranked and prioritised with tensions, trade-offs, or subservient relationships between the goals explicitly outlined and prioritised so as to enable evaluation.
Rethink #3: New Zealand needs to rethink its sole focus on economic growth, shifting to a framework that also empowers communities to meet both the economic and social needs of their populations in the midst of “no growth or even decline.”