Think of a number. There are 600,000 people living in Canterbury right now. How many could the province comfortably accommodate? Are we talking 700,000? A million? Two million?

Canterbury politicians have started to contemplate this question for a number of very good reasons.



Perhaps surprisingly, New Zealand as a nation doesn't operate with a conscious population target. Largely it doesn't have to because it already sits happily at the top end of international developed country statistics for both its baby-making and immigration rates.



The numbers have been managing themselves. Any election year noise about US billionaires slipping the residency net, or clamp downs on temporary work visas, is mostly about a tinkering at the margins of public policy.



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However the world is changing in ways that make a more focused regional approach seem a good idea.



First, an ageing South Island has begun to fall off the Baby Boomer demographic cliff. There is now a wave of retiring white folk who need new workers stepping into their shoes. These have to come from somewhere.



Then rural New Zealand generally has to be concerned about the runaway growth of Auckland – the political implications of that.



With a population of 1.6m, Auckland's infrastructure and social needs are already dominating official thinking in Wellington. And the divide between the super city and the rest of the country is only going to grow.



Massey University demographics researcher Professor Paul Spoonley​ says Auckland is forecast to be responsible for 60 per cent of all New Zealand population increase over the next decade – a mix of higher fertility rates and higher immigration. It will be home to 40 per cent of the country before long.

Or think about it this way. Auckland added 44,000 people last year – one and a half Timarus. And it will do the same this year.

JOHN KIRK-ANDERSON/STUFF Going up or going down?: Canterbury needs to decide whether it likes gentle change or ambitious change.

So no surprise Canterbury is realising that if it wants to avoid being completely over-shadowed, it needs to develop its own clear long-term goals in terms of a population plan. Something a central government can understand and get behind.

So pick a number. Is Canterbury going to be fine with gentle organic growth – the modest 1 per cent track predicted by Statistics NZ? Doing that, it will hit 800,000 people over the next 25 years.



Or does it need to get ambitious – prepare to really pack out the plains as numbers are strength?



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A few years back, economists were talking up the virtues of sheer scale.



Consultant NZIER penned a controversial paper calling for a national population target of 15m. Or not so controversial given it was talking getting there over 50 years.



Christchurch City Council (CCC) finance spokesperson Cr Raf Manji also raised eyebrows when he said that a post-rebuild Christchurch – with its new office blocks, subdivisions and motorway network – could happily house 1m people. Canterbury towns could take a further 1m.



"People still bring that comment up with me," Manji says. "They say you know you were talking about filling in the Eastern seaboard from Rolleston to Amberley. Is that still on the cards?"



Manji admits he was being provocative to get people thinking. But Canterbury has to be looking ahead to where it will be in another three or so years as the insurance-fed rebuild peters out. A stronger underlying economy will have to show through.



And there is a national level logic in pushing Christchurch – a flat, easily connected city with a lot of brand new infrastructure.

"If you're looking at Auckland and thinking, gawd, we might have to spend $5 to $8 billion over the next 10 to 15 years just on its basic infrastructure, then actually the smarter policy is to think about how to get more businesses to move down to Christchurch."

IAIN MCGREGOR/STUFF Man about town: Cr Raf Manji for one supports picking a gutsy number.

Yet Manji agrees the focus can't be just on raw numbers. A Canterbury policy has to be about what type of people and skillsets to attract.

Also tough will be even convincing Wellington bureaucrats to grant Canterbury the freedom to steer its own course. But developing a regional approach is now firmly on the local agenda.



Environment Canterbury (ECan) strategy advisor and secretariat of the Canterbury Mayoral Forum, Dr David Bromell, says it is early days. However several key bits of work are underway.



For several years, the Mayoral Forum has been developing its newcomer and migrant settlement strategy. It started in Ashburton as a way of making a flood of Filipino dairy workers feel welcome on the plains, and is expanding as a social policy generally.



Bromell says the Canterbury Development Corporation (CDC) has also been modelling the region's worker needs when the earthquake recovery does come to an end.



In June, an updated Canterbury Regional Economic Development Strategy (CREDS) called for a goal of recruiting at least 100,000 migrants – both Kiwis moving from other parts of the country and newcomers from overseas – over the next 15 years.



It sounds ambitious, says Bromell, but really it is just the baseline number needed to maintain the current economic equilibrium.



Retiring baby boomers will create a gap that needs to be filled. Without population growth, Canterbury will go backwards.



And a rural unemployment rate of 2.7 per cent – exceptionally low – means employers are already feeling a staffing pinch. CDC says a lack of younger workers could be a real brake on Canterbury's future economy.



So the first order of business is just to maintain the 2 per cent annual population growth track seen during the rebuild and avoiding slipping back to the lower 1 per cent track Canterbury was on before the earthquakes.

That works out to adding 6600 new people a year – about a Lincoln or a couple of Waimates.

DAVID WALKER/STUFF Changing face of a region: Crowds packing this year's Culture Galore festival in Christchurch.

Then Bromell says beyond this is the need for the bigger conversation about what Canterbury wants to shoot for over a 30 or 50 year time frame.

That is shortly going to begin with a piece of work being led by the new Committee for Canterbury, the business-sponsored think-tank formed along the lines of Australia's Committee for Melbourne.



Bromell has written the initial demographics FAQ for the web-based consultation effort that is planned for launch in August. It will be interesting what the public has to say once it goes live, he grins.



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So a process is in train. And while it might be expected the conclusion is forgone – Canterbury business leaders especially will be arguing for some chunky growth numbers to rival Auckland – in fact the debate may well head in the exact opposite direction.



Nationally there has also been a resurgence of talk about population politics.



Books like Going Places: Migration, Economics and the Future of New Zealand, by policy analysts Julie Fry and Hayden Glass, have been looking at the realities of the New Zealand approach to immigration.



Then others like former Waikato University professor of demographics Dr Natalie Jackson, and former Reserve Bank economist Michael Reddell, have been questioning the assumption that numbers alone bring an economic benefit.



Jackson contributed to a special edition of New Zealand's Policy Quarterly in June. She pointed out that mass migration is often put forward as a way to tackle the grey wave. Import youth.



However she says this is no real solution because those migrants eventually age too.



"It's a Catch-22 situation. The more long-term migrants you bring in to solve the short-term issues, the more you have to keep bringing in. Basically there is no level of migration that will prevent either structural or numerical ageing."



Talking about Canterbury, Jackson also says it is far better off than other South Island regions. Cities like Invercargill and Dunedin face dramatic decline because they have to cope with both a retiring bulge of baby boomers and their young leaving town for better prospects.



Greater Christchurch is more like Auckland in being a destination for internal migration, she says.

"Between 2008 and 2013 for example, Selwyn and Waimakariri had the nation's highest and second-highest net migration gains out of all 67 territorial authorities."

CHRIS HILLOCK/STUFF Demographics expert Dr Natalie Jackson: Greying can't be fixed by importing youth in fact.

So while Canterbury might profitably look at doing something about its own low birth rates – consider family-friendly policies – demographic balance is not a good reason for pursuing high migration numbers, Jackson says.

On his blog, Croaking Cassandra, Reddell questions population growth at a more basic level.



He says international comparisons show that adding bodies to a region will of course increase its total economic activity, but simply on a one for one basis. Another consumer.



For New Zealand, it only makes sense to push immigration rates if it brings in people with the skills to lift individual productivity and entrepreneurship – create an economic multiplier effect.



And even then, says Reddell – to the degree New Zealand is going to stay an agricultural export nation – there is a question of why bother?



Reddell says to shift the country towards some high productivity economy – a little Denmark or Singapore at the far end of the world – would require a matching investment in a new national educational and business infrastructure.



Given the cost of that, for the regions especially, the rational economic course is thus likely to be forget dramatic population change and concentrate on making farming pay.



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Manji – himself an immigrant, a former London money market whiz – still hankers after gutsy nation-transforming targets.



He says he looks at the map of Southland – the vast empty spaces around Lumsden and Gore – and wonders why not build a city of 1m people there?



It would require a huge government investment, but New Zealand really does have the room to be bold.



However Manji agrees that when Canterbury sits down to develop an actual policy for itself, it is likely to be targeting two reasonably specific immigration questions – how to do a better job attracting entrepreneurs and what to do about the big rise in temporary foreign workers.



Figures recently compiled by Auckland University researcher Dr Francis Collins show how quickly New Zealand has come to rely on importing the labour it needs on short-stay visas of up to three years.



He says over the past two decades, the number of permanent migrants has remained in fact remarkably constant at 40,000 to 50,000 a year. Yet the number arriving on temporary work visas – with limited rights and welfare support – has soared from 30,000 to nearly 200,000.



Canterbury has been one of the hot spots, first with its dairy conversion boom and the need for staff willing to work unsocial hours, then with the construction workers employed in the earthquake recovery.



Canterbury mayors are pointing at the temporary visa system as an example of how Auckland's needs have started to dictate policy for the rest of the country.



In April, Immigration Minister Michael Woodhouse proposed a crack-down on temporary workers being able to roll over their visas. He wants to make them leave for a least a year before reapplying.



But the Mayoral Forum says this is about trying to put a brake on Auckland's current growth spurt and over-heated housing market. For Canterbury farmers, it will be a massive headache if they have to find and retrain new staff every three years.

Retired Lincoln University researcher Dr Rupert Tipples, who studied migrant dairy workers, says it is the kind of issue that needs the airing of a public debate.

MARTIN VAN BEYNEN/STUFF Tough job: Filipino dairy worker on Waimate farm. Temporary migrant visas have soared six-fold.

It is an international phenomenon – the rise of the "global precariat", rich countries being able to ship in and ship out armies of workers at will.

Tipples says the South Island has benefited from seasonal schemes where Pacific Island labour is brought in to harvest fruit or prune vines for many years now. Now a reliance on much longer-term dairy contracts has snuck up without many realising.



It feels predatory. Filipinos can send their children to the local school, yet stay long enough and they still have to pay international fees for them to go to university, Tipples says.



"There was a case where someone was the Dux down at Winton but then was lost to the New Zealand system."



On the other hand, temporary workers are happy at what they can earn here to send back home. "So yes we're taking advantage. But they get a lot out of it too."



The key is a visa arrangement that is fit for purpose, says Tipples – which for Canterbury would be one integrated into its general long-term goals, he agrees.



The other obvious focus of policy-making is attracting skilled migrants. Or rather, says Manji, targeting people who simply have enough youth, creativity and a genuine desire to make a go of a move to Canterbury.



In Going Places, Fry and Glass track New Zealand's efforts to find immigrants who would make the biggest contribution.



Until the 1990s, the national policy was to favour people from Anglo countries. Then there was a switch to picking those with strong qualifications or a high net worth.



This resulted in a greater diversity but also too many over-qualified taxi drivers and retired millionaires.



Fry and Glass say the system has been steadily tightened until a concrete job offer has become the over-riding factor.



And it has worked. Over 90 per cent of economic immigrants are employed six months after arriving – which is one of the best employment rates in the world.



However Fry and Glass say that is also quite stifling. It fits overseas talent to existing jobs rather than finding people who might create whole new businesses in New Zealand.



This has resulted in another bout of fine-tuning.



Manji raised his own proposal for a more open-ended talent visa scheme as part of the Christchurch recovery.



His idea was that the city council could be given 300 temporary working visas to hand out to bright under-30 year olds. "Two years to do what you want," he says.

The difference was it would be backed by a local mentor network to help the potential migrants to find their feet in the city.

GEORGE HEARD/STUFF Policy launch: Canterbury's mayors gather for the latest update to the region's economic development strategy.

In the end, Immigration NZ did not buy it, but did adopt something similar – the new Global Impact Visa – although Manji says this is aimed more at already proven tech entrepreneurs and is run nationally.

Manji says the lesson is still that Canterbury needs to develop its own local population and migration policies. It has to hit Wellington with well-informed views that can't be ignored.

"That's our pitch to government. Give us more power to take these decisions. We will take our share of managing the risks.

"But if we just sit here and have to take direction from Wellington – which is not in touch with what we want to do – then we're never going to get anywhere."

So there is no immediate panic. The numbers show Canterbury is actually starting from a position of strength compared with most of the rest of country.

Yet ECan's Bromell says that is also the right time to talk about targets. With the rebuild money and a returning Christchurch, Canterbury will be looking an attractive destination for the next few years.

So next step, the Committee for Canterbury and its efforts to foster a productive public debate.

Think of a number. Make an argument for what regional prosperity looks like. There is going to be a chance to have a say.