A Northland meeting hosted by the Focus Party has been told the Government's obsession with Auckland is draining the life-blood out of the province.
The party is campaigning for a power shift back to local communities, with more resources going to local government, and says it will stand candidates in the general election.
Its president, Ken Rintoul, said his civil engineering company has lost more than 100 staff since the Government took roading money from the regions and poured it onto cities.
The meeting in Kaikohe featured as guest speaker Dr Oliver Hartwich, director of the New Zealand Initiative, a Wellington-based business-led think tank.
Dr Hartwich said government in New Zealand has become unhealthily centralised and in the OECD only Greece and Ireland are more centralised. He said 91 percent of all government spending is controlled by Wellington.
Central government was now making many decisions that would be better made at a local level, he said, and running services that good local government could do better, including school and policing. But to do that, councils would need to collect a share of income tax rather than rating landowners as they do now.
Other speakers at the meeting said their communities had been healthier and better run by small councils in the days before amalgamation, or centralising local government, in 1989.
Another saw central government as obsessed with Auckland; growing like a tumour and sucking the life-blood out of the productive provinces.
