KEY POINTS:
People are bailing out of Auckland in droves. And thousands of us aren't migrating to near or far-off lands, but simply to the provinces of our homeland.
That news came to me at the weekend in an article in the Sunday Star-Times which recorded that between 2001 and last year, 76,000 Aucklanders left for the provinces, while only 59,000-odd arrived in the metropolis from other regions.
I can't say I was even a bit surprised, for the quality of life in this city has deteriorated markedly in the past 20 years or so, and ever more quickly since the dawn of the 21st century.
What filled me with horror was this statement by the paper's editor, Cate Brett: "But the fact remains that, thanks to the birth rate and immigration, within 20 years Auckland will account for 40 per cent of the country's population.
"Hating Auckland will mean hating New Zealand because there is no escaping the fact [that] Auckland, with all its warts, represents who we are as a country."
If what Brett writes is true - and I fear she has the right of it - then all I can say is "how unutterably sad".
For what it means is that as a country we will live in an ever more crowded and unfriendly environment in which privacy is but a memory, scarred by big, ugly apartment buildings rapidly becoming slums. And spreading suburban ghettos based on ethnicity and religion. And more and more infill housing so you can shake hands with your neighbour out the kitchen window (although your neighbour is more likely to shake his/her fist at you).
Hours of time and buckets of money will be wasted trying to get from point A to point B by car or bus as the city's roading infrastructure falls further and further behind the needs. Even today many of us stay close to our homes at weekends because we won't put up with the frustrations of trying to go anywhere.
Local body services, inadequate as they are already, will struggle with increasing lack of success to deal with sewage and stormwater disposal and rubbish collection. Heaven knows the inner harbour is polluted enough as it is but I fear we ain't seen nothin' yet.
My suburb right now resembles a Third World slum with the streets piled high with inorganic rubbish, some of which has been there for weeks uncollected by council services obviously not well enough organised or manned to get the job done efficiently.
Neighbourliness and community spirit, already at a premium, will, like privacy, become an ever-dimmer memory; our parks will deteriorate as they become too crowded to cope; and those Aucklanders so inclined will have to travel further and further to get away from it all.
And over all will remain that mercenary miasma which permeates this metropolis in which everyone knows the price of everything, but few know the value of anything.
If this is what Cate Brett envisages as the New Zealand of tomorrow, then I don't want a bar of it. I'm getting out just as soon as I can and all I can hope for is that the virus that is Auckland will take a long time to spread past the Bombay Hills.
Yet I detect that it is already infecting some other parts of the country - Tauranga and Nelson to name two - but that's because they have become favoured retirement places for big-city folks who have taken their social and economic mores with them.
Which probably helps to explain why 28.2 per cent of Nelson residents left for elsewhere between 2001 and last year, a net loss of more than 1550 people.
When I came to Auckland in the early 1970s it was a magic place, and that's looking back at it without the need for rose-tinted glasses.
I have stayed here - like, I suspect, tens of thousands of others - because this is where the work is and because, since the mid-1980s, jobs haven't been easy to find for men approaching or entering middle age.
Auckland has been good to me, professionally and financially. I have worked for two of the best daily newspapers in the Southern Hemisphere - the long-gone Auckland Star and the one you're reading right now - and I have, thanks to buying and selling in a steadily rising real estate market, managed to acquire a more than just comfortable home.
But I am increasingly uncomfortable here, for I am a man of a bygone era and while I have moved with the times I have moved to my limit.
So, perhaps unwisely, I have sought to find once again a place to live that more closely matches that from which I came.
That place has been found. Watch this space.
