Northland must have one voice

The Whangarei Economic Development Group strongly supports reducing the current number of local authority organisations that represent a comparatively small population.

WEDG represents business owners wanting to strongly support development and growth of business interests in the local area. I believe that a positive outcome of local authorities combining forces would be a united and focused approach to economic development, and would remove the current inefficiencies associated with having too many parties involved.

The number of entities dabbling in economic development, and all doing separate plans for our region, just doesn't make much sense. There are some good people working hard in the economic development sphere, but we must have one voice or we will continue to struggle when it comes to securing central government support for initiatives in the Northland region"

Not only are there three district councils north of the Auckland Super City devoting resources to development, there is also Northland Inc which is funded via the regional council. And there is also NEAG (Northland Economic Action Group) and NIF (Northland Intersectoral Forum) and a range of others who all claim to be actively promoting and resourcing economic development.

WEDG favours a single unitary authority for the whole of Northland. However, the members accept that in practice we are probably not ready to suddenly leap from having four separate councils to just having one.

We still have a lot of proud parochialism in our separate districts and, at this stage, we believe jumping straight to a single authority would likely be opposed by many and leave us in the unfortunate position of retaining our status quo - which simply has not worked in the best interests of Northlanders."

As a first step in a sensible process, WEDG is publicly supporting the current option for two unitary authorities - one for the Far North and one for the combined Whangarei/Kaipara district.