The government department has committed to create a ‘‘one-off scenario’’ factoring in actual growth in Queenstown-Lakes.
It follows a presentation last Wednesday, at the Queenstown Business Chamber of Commerce’s Westpac Smarts event, by Arrowtown-based regional economist Benje Patterson, at which a senior demographer, with 37 years’ experience in the department leading population projections, and a Stats NZ deputy CEO were present.
Patterson called out the woefully-lacking population projections Stats NZ has historically published for the Queenstown-Lakes area — for example, in 2012, the department projected the district’s population would be 47,200 in 2031.
Last year, the actual population was 53,800 — already at the threshold where a typical population would be deemed a city. Patterson projects, if current growth patterns continue, by 2031 it’ll be home to at least 69,500 people.
That’s 22,000 more than Stats NZ expected.
He tells Mountain Scene the Wellington boffins got wind of his presentation and ‘‘were not particularly happy about being singled out’’ and wanted to have a conversation.
So he suggested they attend the presentation and talk to local business leaders and the council. ‘‘They jumped straight on to that idea and came down.’’
Along with the commitment to running a scenario factoring in local growth, which Patterson expects to see ‘‘in the coming months’’, they’ve also committed to standing beside Queenstown-Lakes as the district has discussions with other government departments and ‘‘suggest to them that they put emphasis on this high-side [growth] scenario’’.
And, when they update their more detailed projections next year, when they’ll look at suburb-level data, they’ve committed to working closely with Queens-town’s council to ensure, geographically, they reflect where population growth’s expected to occur, which will result in ‘‘extreme growth pressure’’.
‘‘It was put forward, very strongly, that is not only to make sure that overall our population projections reflect both the demand of the capacity that’s there, but also that agencies that are looking at social wellbeing, like MSD, have a much better handle of where we’re having growth so that they can align some of the subsidies that they give for rent to where there’s actually urban areas developing.’’
Patterson says one of the biggest acknowledgements from Statistics NZ last week, though, was that ‘‘100% of the time over the past 30 years, their projections have been wrong’’.
‘‘And not just slightly wrong, but wrong by an order of magnitude of 50%.
‘‘We’re talking about projections needing to be plausible and we agreed that it’s simply not plausible if 100% of the time you only are less than half right.’’
He says the repercussions of being that wrong, that often, are huge, given it’s playing with the wellbeing of a huge number of people.
‘‘We emphasised that this isn’t just about the congestion in our roads and whether we get appropriate crossings of the river from [NZ Transport Agency] Waka Kotahi on the horizon.
‘‘This isn’t just about education or energy.
‘‘This is actually about things like health and the massive, massive uproar in Dunedin about potential constraints on their $2 billion hospital investment are ridiculous when you consider the fact that we have zero hospitals that can have any sort of emergency medical procedures done.’’
Patterson estimates the combined population of the Queenstown-Lakes and Cromwell will exceed Dunedin’s within half a generation — at last week’s presentation, he said the area could be home to about 160,000 people by 2041, outstripping Dunedin by about 20,000.
That’d make this area the second most populous in the South Island.
‘‘That’s something that we need to make sure is front and centre of decision-makers in Wellington as a potential and plausible scenario, so that when they’re looking at [investment decisions] Queens-town stands up as being somewhere that rises to the top, because our growth shows that that’s what we need.’’
