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.”
63 Comments
Yep. it's a global problem.
http://www.odt.co.nz/opinion/opinion/72347/biggest-crisis-facing-planet-numbers
four years ago. Go figure. You expect leaders to be ahead of the play......... he's only just starting to peek under the carpet - at least, in public.
Why should it be a racist issue? If you are going to cut immigration then it would have to be across the board: British, South African, India, Pacific, China, USA ... the lot. Australia might be a problem however as our relationship is closer and different to any other that we have.
This is the most sensible thing that I have heard from Len Brown and I have to agree that we cannot ignore the historical pattern. As I have said before Our population is larger than we can either house or productively employ so adding people only fuels the population driven ponzie scheme aspect of our ecconomy. Sooner or later this will catch up with us, if it is not already doing so. It is also clear that with our dissapearing industrial sector, Auckland is a very signifficant net drain on the NZ ecconomy, which is principaly supported by agriculture. More people in NZ especially in Auckland will do us no good. There are a number of examples of countries with falling populations that are doing very well, infact most of them are doing very well. Maybe artificailly putting a noose around the property supply in Auckland and letting the city price itself into oblivion would be in the best interests of the country. (Not really as an awfull lot of damage to the whole ecconomy would result, we would have to manage things far better than that.)
The environment is another good reason to restrict or reverse population growth. We have too many people on earth now and it is clear that the environment is not coping, adding more is going to make matters a whole lot worse. While it is politically incorrect to say so, sooner or later we are going to have to face this issue.
Of course it's a racist issue, because immigration comprises people of other nationalities, and people of other nationalities who are already here, and seeking to get their brethren in under the "family reunion" rules are the first to pull out the racist card, and kill the debate.
Len Brown's solution is not to curtail growth arising from uncontrolled immigration, but to shift the problem elsewhere, so it becomes someone elses problem
QED. Problem solved. Deep thinking.
New Zealand's current capacity to absorb unlimited immigration without diminishing the lives of those already living here is at an end. The country has serious infrastructure problems. It has serious housing problems. Those problems were exacerbated by the chch earthquakes, in nz's second largest city (sink hole). The best response to the earthquakes would have been to suspend all inbound immigration for the duration, until chch is sorted out and up and running again.
An additional problem with no solution is the 90,000 leaky homes. Still no solution after 10 years. Now Christchurch. How long do you think that will take? In the meantime they still keep coming. Wonder where Brown had in mind to re-distribute to? Christchurch is out. Ekatahuna?
Elites like more low wage slaves - easier to get nannys, gardeners, waiters etc. So they encourage immigration and growth, helping to drive down wage rates and prospects locally, down towards the world price. Meanwhile the left worry about being racist - so no one is actually alowed to talk about immigration. The Right/Elites are laughing
Yep they love unemployment because it stops wage inflation. They even give it a name - structural unemployment. Those on welfare serve a double pupose. Wage suppression for low skilled jobs and a convenient whipping boy. Natural population growth is less than the number leaving each year. Without immigration there would be no housing crisis, lower unemployment and higher wages. How many jobs filled by immigrants can't be filled by a local, skilled or unskilled with the appropriate training and mentoring?
Greens have seriously dropped the ball on this. They should be at the forefront of population policy debate but are petrified of being labeled luddites or racist
That's because linear numbers can never assuage exponential projections. The old NZED engineers had exactly the same problem; they'd project the 2% (sound innocuous, eh?) growth in demand, look at the rivers available, throw up their hand and go "nuclear". Which of course suffers from ultimate constraint too.
Hopefully he sparks the real debate we need - but I doubt it. There's more of the political spectrum don't want that particular cat out of the bag, than I'd thought.
That's because probably half of those build ready sites are probably people's gardens or tennis courts which just happen to have a separate title which they don't have any intention of selling off.
You would be suprised how many properties actually have more than one (buildable) title, and in a city of 500,000 properties, I can easily imagine that it's a non trivial number.
We've got one in Mt Eden, a normal villa but it happens to be on two titles dating from the 1920s, one title is the garden, which you just wouldn't sell separately because it's also the garaging and parking.
That's because I broke it (scraper) in 1973.
You can add to that, that Key wants hoards of immigrant workers (aka tax slaves) so that the Government coffers can be enriched and so that he and his party can build great monuments to their economic greatness!! (Stadiums, convention centres, motorways etc etc!!)
Well off the beaten track for most I imagine but two nations I follow with interest are Pakistan and Egypt, since both face massive problems arising from overpopulation and resource depletion. I think one or other or both will approach 'failed state' status in the next 5 years. Egypt has a burgeoning population of 80 million plus and relies on a narrow strip of fertile land around the Nile for most of its food. However even this now faces problems from upstream states threatening to take more water from the upper reaches of the river. It used to produce meaningful quantities of oil and gas but its own version of peakoil means it is now dependent on energy hand outs from neighbours. Its only other major source of foreign income (tourism) is in deep trouble. It is going to get pretty 'hot' in Egypt pretty soon:
http://news.yahoo.com/fuel-short-egypt-faces-long-hot-summer-110414225…
We are of course a million miles away from the Egyptian situation but then perhaps Auckland tells us a little about how you eventually get there if you are stupid enough to let unplanned growth (in population and resource demands) just forge ahead unremittingly. We need a conversation NOW about New Zealand's population as a whole, not just Auckland's.
There are some good reads about ME history, which put what Andyh is saying into historical perspective. With less resources to start with, they kept their numbers down via myrid minor skirmishes, and cohestion was hard to engineer, harder to maintain.
http://www.biblicalarchaeology.org/daily/gertrude-bell-queen-of-the-desert-shaper-of-nations/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seven_Pillars_of_Wisdom
http://www.amazon.com/In-Aleppo-Once-Taqui-Altounyan/dp/0719519225
(and totally off-topic, Taqui Altounyan was the role-model for 'John' from the Ransome 'Swallows and Amazons' series. Younger bro Roger - his name was retained in the novels) was an interesting dude too
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roger_Altounyan
Maybe we can tie it back to thread via medicine increasing the population.......... :)
And here's the latest on Egypt & the Nile - http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/middle_east/egypt-frets-fumes-over-…
During the late Roman Republic/Early Empire (the year 'dot') the Italic Peninsula including the Po Valley was (if I remember rightly) self sufficient in grain even though the city of Rome had grown to the giddy population of over 1,000.000.
Oneof the major roles of Egypt was to supply the annonum a form of bribery/social welfare. Each citizen of Rome was entitled to a daily free handout of grain from Egypt simply by virtue of living there. I doubt the Egyptians (whose Pharoah was Greek anyway) were operating on a Fairtrade basis.
Spengler (David P Goldman) is yer go-to common tater on ME and demographics. His take on Egypt et al is sobering reading. It ain't just fuel, but food. His one-liner: Asian pigs eat better than Eqyptian peasants....Asia can simply outbid such countries for calories. And he spotted this - oh - 2+ years ago...
Spengler is a guru.
Note that the real problem in Egypt is culture and institutions - which means that they are poor and can be outbidded for food supplies. Japan does not have this problem, in spite of being far more overpopulated than Egypt. Nor does Israel. Or the Netherlands. Or Singapore.
In fact Israel is a humiliating object lesson to the busted-arse nations all around it with similar climate and geography. It can be interesting to find data on Israeli patent numbers versus those of the dozens of times more numerous Arab speakers surrounding it; or the number of books annually translated to and published in Hebrew versus Arabic.
And at least some of the Arabs have oil wealth.......!
Egypt does get a awful lot of sun, they need to follow Libya's example and start building giant solar plants in the dessert, a cable to southern Europe and start supply the European grid.
Problem with Egypt right now is the Arab Spring didn't quite work out how the west planned.
No worries Len...if those in Auckland have to fork out an extra 5% on their annual rating theft, every year, until ten years have passed...and the govt flogs that dosh and hands it out to other local bodies, if their rates are cut back by 5% a year for the next ten years....
That would take the heat out of the Auckland bubble...
How about it Len...?
The famous "Costs of Sprawl: report in the USA found that the costs of unconstrained urban growth was $80 per household per year. Therefore governments everywhere have been lobbied furiously by certain people, to constrain urban growth, unfortunately with quite some success.
The fact that the cost of inflated price housing lands several thousand dollars a year extra cost onto households seems to not bother them.
Looks like fertility is dropping quite fast in some countries so the q is how to make this happen across the board, and yes faster. Also aloow for expat nzers coming back....wonder how many are abroad expecting the right to return and welfare when they do.
regards
Population control seems to be a taboo subject. It will surely only work in an oppressive dictatorship, and that's kind of unpopular. Left to free will people will happily just keep multiplying.
Of course at some point there will be corrections beyond our control, whether resource-constrained or pandemic or natural disaster (perhaps not so natural). Well, just my 10c...
Till then, party time! Woohoo! :-/
Oh it will not be that clean and calm.....read a few of Spengler's back issues at Asia Times...there will be a lotta jostling, sharp elbows and one immediate result of That will be mass migrations, and it won't be just the godwits. But given the width of the Tasman, perhaps plane people.....
Quite so, Steven.
The "population bomb" is a non-problem in the West and seems to be solving itself everywhere else of its own accord as people get wealthier and better educated.
I am glad others on here read "Spengler".
There is an awful lot of post-enlightenment hysteria abroad and unfortunately, even though this site should be frequented mostly by intelligent economic thinkers, we get a lot of the hysteria here too.
Really, someone who thinks that New Zealand has a problem with population needs to have the men in white coats sent around. The same people tend to also think we should have commuter rail systems "like Europe" - when much of Europe is about 30 times as densely populated as we are. The same people also tend to be opposed to having a strong defence force, which is odd given that they posit a global future of Darwinian savagery surrounding living space and resources.
With enough Exocets to deal with invasion fleets, NZ with its 4 million people could easily survive indefinitely at pretty high living standards. In fact it would help if we got a few more people so there was more of a critical mass to support the capital investment necessary to really utilise our own resources without needing to draw on international firms all the time.
The UN have just revised their global population predictions:
''The world's population could reach nearly 11 billion by 2100, the United Nations predicts, which is about 800 million (8 percent) more than the previous projection of 10.1 billion issued in 2011.
The revised estimate is mostly due to a slower-than-expected decline of birth rates in Africa. The current African population is about 1.1 billion and that is now expected to reach 4.2 billion by the end of the century.''
http://healthyliving.msn.com/health-wellness/global-population-could-hi…
Thats an extra 5 billion on todays number (growing at a rate of 75 million extra a year).
Your claim that somehow the global population problem is solving itself doesnt really ring true in the face of that.
Andyh - I saw that too. The problem is that they're doing what the rear-wiew types are doing here - projecting hithertoforeknowns into the future. There is no way in the world - so to speak :) that the global pop will reach 11 billion, or even 9.
But discussing it with that particular poster is a waste of time.
I came across this;
http://media.wix.com/ugd/b629ee_7828654120b619b9aec98d4f18516164.pdf
Which puts much of the discussion in context. Buckminster Fuller was right - unless you look at the whole picture, you're not going to get the right answer(s). Had a good wee rap to a full-house on Thursday;
http://www.otago.ac.nz/news/events/otago048320.html
There's a lot more interest than just a couple of years back. Some architects in the mix - rapped for an hour, questions flat-out for another 1/2 hour, and another hour chatting. The Council is about to look at energy too - seminar shortly. The DCC are onto it, but there is a good chance the ideologues will stomp the momentum - as in Govt override.
wow.....4.4billion, cant see it myself.....consider the migration route used 10,000 years ago....up into europe...just how do these locusts feed?
I think the Un is wrong anyway, fosil fuels wont last that long and by 2100 AGW will be so extreme even if we had the energy we couldnt hold off the climate....
I dont know who are in a bigger la la land, the UN or philb.
regards
You really dont want to or cant get it do you...I really wonder if you can add 2+2 let alone understand the expotential function and time. The amount of fossil fuels even 4 million of us Nzers need on a land area the size of NZ is significant. Roughly that same area as the UK and 70million btw, think NZ is isolated? from that working itself out?
Getting wealthier means exploiting more of the planet's non-renewables, faster. About 1.5billion of us "emjoy first world standards and we've buggered the planet in 50 years, the other 5billion odd want to get to where we are, and wont. It wnt be a quiet event when they realise we've stolen their future.
More ppl? to use a one time resource up faster? no you really dont get it.. I dont know why you even agree with me, except to try and subvert to my own views to support yours in some sick way, I dont think you have a clue what im talking about.
Wow you realise that around 4 million Kiwis and 70 million Poms have around the same land area each (and NZ probably has more natural resources) and you are still raving on about NZ's population being "unsustainable"?????
I'll give the men in white coats a call for you.
Your hysteria is showing, half that comment is incomprehensible.
NZ could probably support 4 million hunter-gatherers.
Kevin Cudby, in his book "From Smoke to Mirrors" describes how NZ's 4 million people could maintain their current standard of living with renewable energy. That is how lightly populated NZ is.
I agree with you when you deserve it. You show good intelligence, well ahead of PDK, who concedes nothing in his sheer religious absolutism. I can't understand why you turn around and give me all that hysteria in response.
I turn around and tell you off when you try and usurp my words and twist it out of context and to your own goals. Hence I will pull you up on it, justify your own point of view, dont try and use my point of views for that please.
The poms have no coal left, it peaked in 1913 and despite their best endevours through WW1 never exceeded that 1913 peak coal event. Ditto North Sea oil, it peaked in 1999 its never going to surpass that. So 70million ppl have chewed their way throught a huge "gift" that can never be repeated and now they have to import it. NZ on the other hand shows little sign of having anywhere near that level of oil and gas. PS was was the UK's population in 1913? 41million, yet in about 50 odd years they had peaked the coal output. Id rather have 4million and peak the coal output 500 years from now myself.
NZ 4million hunter gathers? yet how many maori ate out the moas? and in how few years? Right now I hazard a rough guess that 1 in 10 NZers hold a FAL and probably only 1 in 15 hunt, I can so see way that every NZer having a gun and using it a few times a week could be sustained....certianly not with your vision of surburbia.
PDK actually is far brighter than am I, he's proved it enough with his ability, sadly for you, you are not bright enough to realise he's that much brighter than you.
regards
The Poms are probably going to start on their gas now.
In any case, the Japanese haven't died off because they are not self sufficient in resources, have they?
The rest of the uninhabited world has enough resources to keep the inhabited bits going for milennia even at current known levels of reserves of coal alone.
And as George Reisman points out in that essay your mind is incapable of understanding, most of the earth's surface has not even been "prospected" for resources yet.
You Greenie fanatics are all the same. You suffer from either a terrible mental disproportionism about the size of the planet - you visualise it mentally as being wall-to-wall Manhattan or Karachi with humanity already, as if the planet is only 1/500 the size it is - or you have a religious-fundamentalist sort of objection to the "consumerist" lifestyle and any sort of mumbo-jumbo will do to justify quasi-papal-bulls against it.
I regard it as totally lacking credibility to describe someone as "brighter than me" who has not grasped, after years and years of patient explanation, that a zone boundary results in windfall profits to the owners of land within it. Such a person is right down the bottom of the intelligence gene pool and should not even be allowed to continue wasting time on a forum like this one.
This conversation seems to be getting quite a way off the topic of population growth in Auckland vs. the rest of the country.
"The rest of the uninhabited world has enough resources to keep the inhabited bits going for milennia even at current known levels of reserves of coal alone."
I believe that the people in the inhabited part of the world are finding it increasingly difficult to pay for the resources they're consuming, which are on the whole extracted from less and less convenient places. The upshot being that consumption will fall off way before a resource actually runs out. A tipping point.
There are plenty of examples of civilisations that have peaked and populations have subsequently crashed. In today's world we are better connected so for better or for worse I think it's going to happen to the planet as a whole this time, rather than to a small colony or island.
Really the only long term (I'm not talking about the next financial quarter) way for humans to keep increasing in number and consumption of resources is to find more resources. The only way to do that is to leave the planet and find more worlds to conquer. Given the scale of the challenges facing us there, and the time frame I think we're working with, the odds are really stacked against us. Particularly as the majority cannot even grasp the implications of exponential growth.
LOL, there wont be invsion fleets, there isnt enough here to warrant it. Sure if we found 1 trillion barrels of oil.....doubt even 50billion..../
What we will see is flotaillas of boat ppl and ww2 tech era stuff can deal with them, ie simple bomb dropping and machine guns is more than adequate. Which is just as well as exocets need an incredible amount of tech....but then you dont understand tech at all.
regards
It's ME that "doesn't understand tech"? Well, I like that....!!!
It is me who is a tech optimist; no Malthusian pessimist has a clue about tech and its exponential function.
"......there isnt enough here to warrant (invasion fleets)......"
Oh, you're one of those as well. The world is gonna run out of everything and collapse, and no-one with the military strength will have bothered with the locations of potential resources where almost nil actual exploitation of them has occurred due to severe under-population.
You are a classic example of "disproportionism". You really imagine planet earth to only be about 1/50 the size it actually is.
Here's a bit of a display of reason and enlightenment values for you, once again:
No, you have a belief that someone will invent a technology you believe in your head will one day exist, despite the laws of thermodynamics, despite the math, despite the geology and despite the lack of time.
Mises institute, LOL, give me a break...Oh dear trot out the extremist political think tank stuff yet again. Congrats, yet again you show your belief in politics overrides any possibility of a rational discusion.
PS dont try and imagine what I think, you are utterly wrong.
regards
"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."
Yeah, it doesn't really make a big difference because...
In http://www.interest.co.nz/property/64705/auckland-mayor-len-brown-spruiks-unitary-plan-says-short-putting-barbed-wire-around-c I calculated the growth by 1 million people from 1.5 million at present to 2.5 million in 2040 to be approx. 1.9% per year. That rate of growth will get you to 3 million people by 2050.
If instead we go from 1.5 million people now to 2.2 million in 2040 (growth of 700000 people) that is approx. 1.4% growth per year. That rate of growth will get you to 3 million people by 2062. Just 12 years longer.
Will all these people make Auckland "better"?
Getting back to housing all these people, at even 1.4% growth that's 21000 more people this year will require housing in Auckland. Each year the number of new people requiring housing will grow and by 2062 there will be 42000 new people each and every year finding a place to live in Auckland.
The use of the High projection by Council is flawed, and so is Len brown's argument in defence. The earlier period he quoted was characterised by high immigration that is unlikely to be replicated , and there was also far more potential for development to occur economically as the city was much lower density and regulatory costs etc were also much lower.
Versus the earlier period, the economics of development are likely to continue to be marginal, and if not enough houses will be built then fewer people will come
Good debate that we should be having but it will never be more than that. Anti-immigration immediately brings connotations of racism and that is political suicide, think Pauline Hanson in Aus. Also why Winston is sidelined here in NZ.
No population growth will also slow economic growth in the short term until we shift back from a service economy to a producer economy. There will be short term pain but ultimately long term gain as the same number of resources are spread amongst less people.
"King Dick" Seddon's government in the late 1800's borrowed huge to put in national rail and ports and other infrastructure, on the assumption that immigration would continue to the point that NZ's population would reach 30 million.
But what did they know, compared to paragons of the enlightenment like Powerdownkiwi?
Of course most of those 30 million would be here instead of somewhere else, leaving the global population no different.
But this is the reason why NZ has a national rail system that is like the "Concorde" project. It cost heaps to build, and has never "paid back" a cent, being an ongoing "cost sink" to the government. The subsidies thrown at it every year merely add to the total cost already accumulated.
Everyone knows I am not a Greenie, but because I am an objectivist on economics, I would say that most of NZ might as well have been left to nature, rather than farmed for decades at a net cost to the economy as a whole - this being in the cost of transport subsidies for bulky low value produce as well as the decades of direct subsidies that were mercifully ended by Roger Douglas. Note that while roads that carry 35,000 cars a day for the urban economy, are deprived of the funds to make them 2-lanes-each-way, the country has tenss of thousands of kilometers of rural roads that carry single figures of vehicles every day, to serve a rural economy that probably contributes about 1/500th of the tax revenue per road lane mile of what the urban one does.
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