As much as I love what we have here in New Zealand, when I get to be on the other side of the world I always look with envy at what they have there. It’s amazing how much more you can do when you have enough people. You notice it in all kinds of ways, large and small. A good restaurant can sustain itself just on foot traffic. A theatre company can tour regional towns and still pay its artists properly. A manufacturer with an interesting idea can begin with a local market large enough to let them grow at a natural pace. It's not that those things aren't possible here, but the economics are tighter, the risks are bigger, and the margin between success and failure narrows considerably when your potential customer base is five million people spread across a pair of islands at the bottom of the world.
So when I'm looking with that envy, I'm also often thinking: what if we approached population growth differently? What if, instead of something that happens to us, we treated it as part of a deliberate, determined, well-conceived and sustainable plan? To be fair, we've had a run or two at this already, backwards, with our eyes closed. We've opened the doors without doing the thinking, without building the infrastructure to match. The result has been housing shortages, stretched services, cities that haven't had time to plan for themselves.
But that's not an argument against growth. It's an argument for doing it properly, and we haven't really yet tried that. What if we set ourselves the ambitious goal of growing from five million to 25 million people? Carefully, sustainably and over decades, I hasten to add, but yes, we end up at 25 million. I’m imagining towns and cities across Aotearoa with a wind behind their back of genuine investment and real purpose. We'd be welcoming people with skills, of course, but we'd also be open to the kinds of people who've always made places work; people who arrive with little and build something, who bring energy and ideas and willingness to try things.
