Those bludgers north of the Bombays ...

By ANDREW LAXON

As Aucklanders enjoy a day off in the sun today - or more likely dodge the next heavy shower - they could reflect on a strange national obsession.

For some reason, much of the rest of New Zealand believes its biggest city is a parasite, spending the hard-earned cash produced by those working south of the Bombay Hills.

Fortunately, few Aucklanders will waste precious holiday time worrying about this. But occasionally there is no escaping it. Maybe one of the relatives from down country just won't leave the subject alone. Arguments rage over the barbie, and it can take forever to get back to the cricket.

So, in the interests of settling any Anniversary Day disputes, here are the answers to some of the most frequently heard views about Aucklanders - the repeatable ones, anyway.

Is Auckland really bludging off the rest of New Zealand?

Unfortunately, yes, if you take a hardline economic approach.

This popular view is backed up by figures from the one organisation you might expect to be sticking up for the city. In its interim report last year, Competitive Auckland - a charitable trust-cum-lobby group of business leaders which aims to make Auckland a world-class business centre - concluded that the city was in very poor economic health.

The report was mostly concerned with Auckland's sluggish performance alongside overseas competitors such as Hong Kong, London, New York and Singapore. But Herald columnist Brian Gaynor chose to focus on the even more embarrassing comparisons with the rest of the country.

The report, he wrote bluntly, "shows that we are bludging off the rest of New Zealand and the country would be better off without us".

He noted that the region was "totally responsible for the country's trade deficit". In the June 1999 year, Auckland had a trade deficit of $2.2 billion while the rest of the country had a surplus of $1.8 billion.

"Our export performance is abysmal - but we still drive around in late-model European cars that the rest of the country pays for."

Hasn't the rest of New Zealand been saying this for years? Yes. For instance, in an angry exchange of letters in this paper a few months earlier, Taumarunui reader Jean Ross, wrote: "We get very annoyed when Aucklanders fail to appreciate that the bulk of their overseas earnings (which, after all, in the end finance their lifestyles) come from primary production and tourism - both of which are largely undertaken by people outside the Auckland isthmus."

Even Finance Minister Michael Cullen has publicly subscribed to the Auckland bludger theory. As Labour finance spokesman in March 1998, the Dunedin South MP told a rural audience in the Taranaki-King Country byelection campaign that Auckland "sits atop the nation like a great crushing weight", importing too much and producing too little for export relative to its population.

So the rest of the country would be better to declare independence at once?

Well, maybe not. For a start, Labour took a political hammering over Dr Cullen's comments, which Auckland Chamber of Commerce chief executive Michael Barnett called "absolutely, positively stupid ... wrong in fact, naive and an act of destructive leadership".

The executive director of Competitive Auckland, Alistair Helm, says the Gaynor-Cullen analysis is true as far as it goes, but it can also be unfair and misleading.

Auckland will never win the "bludger" argument while New Zealand remains an agriculture-based exporter, with a relatively small part of the population - farmers - skewing the GDP per head figures showing how much wealth each of us produces.

But Mr Helm says these figures do not tell the whole story of Auckland's contribution either.

"The reality is the country wouldn't survive without it. It needs Auckland - it's just that the figures don't support it. You take away Auckland and you've got a death, basically, because you've got no added-value products, no distribution channels, no developed market support structure - it all collapses."

Mr Barnett and others made a similar point in 1998. Tempting as an "us and them" comparison can be, the rest of the economy is inextricably linked with Auckland. The real issue is that Auckland's sluggish economic performance is an extreme case of the problems affecting the whole economy.

What are those problems? Competitive Auckland's report says the city - and to a lesser extent the country - concentrates too much on its own needs and not enough on earning its way in the world.

It has relied on population growth and domestically oriented businesses for economic growth. Its educational institutions churn out service-focused people but not enough graduates in economic growth areas such as science, computing and engineering.

To make matters worse, many qualified immigrants cannot use their qualifications, and the economic development which is occurring is fragmented and immature.

Mr Helm adds that Auckland's immigration boom of wealthy, largely middle-aged professional Asians in the early 1990s created short-lived growth in service industries. This gave the city a false sense of security, but delayed the realisation that change was needed.

What about big income-earners like the America's Cup?

The Government's Office of Tourism and Sport found the America's Cup brought $640 million into the New Zealand economy, including $473 million in Auckland, and created 8070 jobs in the city.

International students are also a boom industry. Research for the Asia 2000 Foundation showed that two years ago the city's 11,595 students paid $198 million in fees, accommodation, food, transport, books, appliances and other goods and services.

Figures like these, which often make headlines as spectacular examples of Auckland's new economy, look impressive.

However, they cannot disguise the size of the gap which remains. Brian Gaynor noted that on a GDP per head basis Auckland had dropped so far behind Sydney that it would take "the equivalent of 35 America's Cup campaigns, 26 million extra international visitors or an 80-fold increase in our marine industry to catch up".

Does Auckland contribute anything substantial to the country then? Yes - and this is another reason the bludger argument does not hold and the rest of New Zealand probably would not want to go it alone after all.

Aucklanders pay more tax a head than the rest of New Zealand, so they are effectively subsidising social services for the rest of the country.

That means, for instance, that for years the Government has spent less on healthcare for a child in Auckland than for one in, say, Dunedin.

Auckland hospital bosses have been lobbying the Government to change this, and so-called "population-based funding" is gradually being introduced, butextremely slowly.

Politicians from other regions have sometimes argued that their isolated, rural areas need more money, but Auckland doctors - especially those in South Auckland - say that does not compare with the cost of greater social problems in the city.

Of course, if all Auckland's tax take was spent in the region, there would also be cash for more roads or better public transport or both.

If only Aucklanders could agreeon what they want, that is.

Why can Aucklanders never agree on anything?

Possibly because issues like how to solve the city's traffic gridlock crisis are genuinely tough. The new mayor, John Banks, has been heavily criticised for shooting holes in a regional commitment to revive rail which took years to stitch together.

But, as motorway network enthusiasts point out, he is not alone. Auckland-based Prime Minister Helen Clark, hardly a political ally of the former National MP, sniped last year that "most Aucklanders don't live within cooee of a train station".

Most Aucklanders would agree, however, that their leaders have difficulty speaking with one voice on virtually anything.

Some argue that this is because the city is really a collection of villages, with North Shore-ites feeling no connection to South Aucklanders and vice versa.

Mr Helm disagrees, saying people from around the region do consider themselves Aucklanders. He believes local politics get in the way of Auckland's best attempts to sell itself - such as the time when cities around the world were trying to persuade mobile phone manufacturer Motorola to set up in their backyard.

Auckland may never have succeeded anyway, he admits (Perth won when the West Australian Government offered a $6.7 million incentive package), but the company probably gave up when it had to deal with several different councils.

Does Auckland struggle because it lacks city spirit?

Other New Zealanders regard Aucklanders as rootless, fickle and disloyal.

In a Herald item on "the patchwork city" in November, poet Kevin Ireland argued that lack of civic commitment was a healthy antidote to grievance and parochialism.

Whether you agree, it seems likely that the city's famous inability to pull together could stem from the fact that so many of its citizens come from elsewhere.

Historian Russell Stone has been told that 40 per cent of adults living in Auckland were born somewhere else, and that figure may even be conservative.