OPINION: New Zealand's small towns are a drain on our country and we need to stop throwing money into their bottomless pits.
A report out this week by the Maxim Institute painted a bleak picture of some of our regions, with 44 out of 67 territorial authorities predicted to stop growing or start declining in the next 30 years.
They'll be filled with elderly people requiring expensive infrastructure like hospitals and roads, and not enough young, working people to pay for it.
Single-industry towns with falling populations won't survive to see the end of the century.
Places like Kaipara, the East Coast of the North Island and West Coast of the South Island are in trouble, while Auckland, Wellington, Taranaki, Christchurch and Queenstown are on the up-and-up.
Some say we should continue encouraging city-slickers and new migrants to move to the slowing regions to help them out.
That solution won't work
These areas don't have enough diverse growth to sustain them.
The report says importing people to these areas from other countries won't work.
Even if we increased immigration three-fold, competition from other developed countries facing the same problem as us means it'd be an uphill battle.
The problem is that we are still investing in infrastructure in these areas and when the populations start declining, they'll become even more of a drain on the areas that are doing well.
Instead of encouraging people to move to the country to help pay for the infrastructure, we should be encouraging older people to move to the growth areas.
This solution might
We could even pay them to move. Let's give granny $5000 to move closer to a growth area.
That way, instead of building a new hospital in Taupo and another in Gisborne, we build one big one in Pukekohe.
The less we spend on dying areas, the more we have to spend on growth areas like Auckland, where infrastructure growth is badly needed.
The new would-be hospitals in Taupo and Gisborne would be underutilised in 50 years anyway - like old Olympic stadiums from the 1980s.
Don't get me wrong. I love small-town New Zealand. Beautiful, stress-free and sparsely populated.
But keeping them alive at the expense of urban centre growth is short-sighted.
Or maybe there is still hope?
What if we encouraged, financially or otherwise, young people and new immigrants to move to the dying areas, while at the same time spending less on some infrastructure projects and little bit more on others?
For example, we could spend less on schools in areas that are facing population problems and a bit more on healthcare.
That way, we're not overinvesting in areas that won't be in high demand a few decades down the track while making sure granny has good access to the health services she needs
We are not prepared to deal with this
The intangible and strongly held nostalgic views about New Zealand's small towns make it difficult for government policy-makers to write them off completely, even though that may be the most economically rational thing to do.
The Maxim Institute report makes clear that the Government's regional growth strategy needs to be more clear in its objectives.
The question is: do we just let some areas die a slow death, or act sooner and put them out of their misery early?
Ryan Bridge is the host of Your Sunday on Radiolive. Tune in from 10am to 2pm this week for expert analysis and debate on the future of our regions.
