becoming overcrowded

Opinion

Auckland - fast becoming overcrowded

David Barber

Wellington

Auckland, long known as the biggest Polynesian city in the world, has in the last few years become as popular with Asian immigrants and native-born New Zealanders as it is for new settlers from the Pacific Islands.

So popular, in fact, that latest forecasts see a third of all New Zealanders living in the Auckland region in 25 years’ time when it will have absorbed the equivalent of today’s populations of Christchurch and Dunedin. Auckland already has 27 percent of the country’s resident population and the further projected increase is an “horrific thought,” says Immigration Minister Max Bradford.

It certainly poses a major challenge to central and local gov ernment, who will have to deal with the consequences of such a demographic imbalance. It also presents issues for the Pacific Island community with, on 1996 census figures, nearly two-thirds of its 202,000 New Zealand residents living in Auckland.

People of Pacific Island descent already outnumber ethnic Maori in Auckland - 130,000 to 116,000, according to the statis tics. But they are being caught up fast by Asians, who now num ber more than 100,000.

Asian-bom immigrants accounted for more than half the 82,600 new foreign settlers who arrived in the city between 1991 and 1996. They numbered more than 44,300, compared with 27,400 immigrants of European descent and just under 8000 Pacific Islanders. This increase has been checked by new English language requirements imposed on immigrants in October 1995 and there is anecdotal evidence that a number of disenchanted Asians have returned home.

But Auckland is now entrenched as New Zealand’s most Asian (as well as most Polynesian) city and its population is sure to con tinue increasing more rapidly over the next quarter of a century than most other parts of the country. Immigration is bound to con tinue because the population as a whole is not replacing itself and economic growth will falter without a regular injection of new blood.

On top of this, Auckland is increasingly attractive to native born New Zealanders who are continuing to drift north in search of the sun and jobs. Nearly 90,000 New Zealanders moved to Auckland from other parts of the country between 1991 and 1996.

This was more than double the number of internal migrants who shifted to any other centre.

This all means that Auckland, already New Zealand’s only "metropolis” (city with one million inhabitants) is destined to become bigger, more cosmopolitan and vibrant in the early part of

the 21st century. That will bring benefits for the Pacific Island community along with other Aucklanders.

But there is a downside that astute community leaders should start thinking about.

The rising population will bring added pressures to everyday life in the city and those pressures will affect island people most.

For over-crowding, increased demand for services and competi tion for jobs - inevitable consequences of fast growth in a com munity - impact worse on those at the lower end of the socio-eco nomic scale, and sadly that is where most islanders are.

Successive governments have not been able to do much about this, even as the island population rose 21 percent between 1991 and 1996.

With more than 15 percent of them aged under five, and there fore moving into the workforce early in the next century, how they fare in the new expanded Auckland will be critical to the entire community’s welfare.

Little attention was paid to this question at a national confer ence on population and immigration issues in Wellington in mid- November.

It was held at a time when the continuing immigration debate, the drift to the north, low overall fertility rates and the ageing pop ulation have combined to put the country at what one speaker called “a demographic crossroads”. It requires significant policy decisions which legislators, given lack of information, poor research and their penchant for politically-expedient knee-jerk responses are ill-equipped to make.

If one major message came out of the conference it was the need for long-term inter-locking policies on all aspects of the nation’s demography. This would recognise that fiddling with the immigrant number target every few years in response to changes in public opinion does not amount to a sustainable population pol

icy.

As Bradford said; “For too long, immigration policy has been in a little cell of its own, without too much reference to other gov ernment policies or indeed to other things going on in the com munity.” Despite this, the government seems bent first on lifting immigration numbers beyond the annual target of 35,000 for all new residence approvals this year. At the time of writing, Bradford has not announced a new target, but it was expected to be somewhere between 35,000 and the 55,000 figure prevailing until June 1996.

In the longer term, this could be modest given New Zealand’s ageing population and workforce requirements, according to economist Alex Sundakov, who said 60,000 to 70,000 migrants (including families of workers) could be needed annually in the 2020 s to keep the labour force growing at an optimum 1.5 percent a year.

The key issue, he said, was not immigration policy per se but reducing what he called the “quite significant absorption stress” for the incumbent population - a stress Pacific Island people have felt the impact of over the years though attention has more recent ly been diverted to Asian immigrants.

Unless native New Zealanders changed their attitude towards migrants, immigration was likely to be more or less continuously on the public agenda, Dr Sundakov warned.

That means continuing controversy that does not bode well for the easy assimilation of Pacific island people into the growing Auckland metropolis or any other part of the country. ■