Resident tally drops – first time in 15 years
Southland’s population has fallen for the first time in 15 years, Stats NZ says.
The estimated resident population fell by 100 to 102,700 in the year to July 2021, Stats NZ data shows. The national population grew 0.4% during the same period, to 5.13 million.
However, people are still moving to Southland.
Merlyn Warren, 59, bought a business and moved to Invercargill from Hamilton in January.
She had only ever spent a night or two in Invercargill on her way to tramping trips, and she previously felt the city carried a stigma regarding bad weather or being just a stopoff for Milford.
‘‘I might have been one of the naysayers back in the day, but I’m definitely a convert.’’
Warren bought Southern Comfort Backpackers in the Invercargill suburb of Avenal.
She said she had hosted plenty of people who had moved south and were lodging for a couple of days while they sorted out a house. ‘‘There are so many jobs down here.’’
Following the closure of the Ocean Beach freezing works at Bluff in 1991, as well as redundancies at other freezing works, Southland’s population declined by about 9000 from 1991 to 2006.
The estimated Stats NZ figures show the last time Southland’s population decreased (by 100 in 2007), the population was 93,100.
The biggest increase since then was in 2016, when the population increased by 1300.
Nationally, in the past 12 months, 7300 more people left the country than came in.
Jim Sharratt’s friends had questioned why he was moving his family from Wairarapa to Southland in August last year.
The 56-year-old sheep scanner, originally from the Lake District of northern England, had been looking at Otago.
Instead, he moved to Mabel Bush with his wife after one of their twin daughters started studying at the Southern Institute of Technology in July.
‘‘I thought I would just buy this, sell up and buy a bigger farm. But I think I’ll keep this,’’ Sharratt said. Mabel Bush was quiet, close to town, affordable, and his other daughter was enrolled at SIT as well, he said.
Demographer Paul Spoonley said Southland was one of three regions that had a population decline this past year.
The Auckland and West Coast regions also fell.
Auckland was facing a net loss of about 12,000 a year at the moment, but the number of those people coming to Southland would not make up the difference left by fewer international migrants coming south, he said.
Spoonley predicted Southland’s population would grow by the year 2038, but at a lower rate than during the past 20 years.
That lower rate was because the region was ‘‘ageing rapidly, so Southland’s population will be old-age dominant’’, he said.
When Spoonley was conducting research in 2018, the majority of year 13 students he spoke to did not see themselves in Southland for the long term, he said.
A Stats NZ adviser said uncertainty was inherent in the estimation process.
The population estimates used a method that updated the base census figures, he said.