Margins Matter - New Zealand's Population Geography
Phil McDermott, April 17 2008

Abstract
This paper explores changes in New Zealand’s population geography, including inter-regional movements and international settlement patterns.  It places the residential preferences revealed by these movements in a national setting and examines them at the city and district, metropolitan and local levels.  It relates recent Census-based evidence on population change to experience elsewhere, to employment trends, and to lifestyle issues to suggest that decentralisation will become a more important force.  Auckland’s primacy will continue for the foreseeable future. But questions are raised over the level at which that primacy is sustained as an emerging decentralisation is evident in different growth rates among local council areas both within Auckland Region and between the region and other parts of New Zealand.
The paper analyses the components of recent population change.  The evidence suggests that population expectations founded on “the drift north”, slow growth in the south, structural disadvantages facing Wellington, rural depopulation, and the primacy of Auckland need revision.  The resurgence of second tier and provincial cities, the revitalisation of the rural periphery around major urban areas, and burgeoning lifestyle settlements, both in the shadow of urban areas and beyond, are new facets of New Zealand’s population geography.
This paper has not brought all the evidence together, and the propositions it contains may need to be tested further. Nevertheless, they raise some interesting policy issues, both for the major metropolitan areas and for smaller peripheral and provincial towns and cities.