Yvonne Van Dongen: Self inflicted injury

In 2003 in a letter to the editor of the NZ Herald, New Zealand’s most successful playwright Sir Roger Hall, called the increase in population through migration “an avoidable self-inflicted injury.” At the time the population had just nudged four million and was increasing at a rate of 42,000 per year.

Twenty years later the population is well over five million with an annual net migration three times the number in Hall’s day. Where Hall worried about the reduction in green space and lifestyle, today locals watch essential services and housing straining to cope with the rising population from past years, and wonder how we can possibly absorb more people.