Ian McLean Spokesperson for the Green Party

The Tauranga monthly film group recently showed 'Growthbusters”, the story of one man's fight against the prophet Growth. Set in Colorado, the film documents the effects on a small town of determined growth: four-lane highways, air pollution, community breakdown, increasing taxes, and more.

The film rings true for Tauranga, and stimulates exploration of how Tauranga has changed since I was born into the isolated community of 300 persons that once inhabited a small village, affectionately called The Mount.

Highways. Heaps of them, dominating and segregating our community by creating noise, pollution, environmental destruction, barriers, and ultimately, global warming.

Transportation. We commute for longer, at greater cost, and at greater risk due to vehicle densities.

Estuaries. We no longer collect kai moana in the upper estuaries, which are choked with mud, mangroves, and effluent from farms, stormwater and septic tanks.

Downtown. A struggling downtown is a frequent cost of growth, as satellite centres grow among sprawling communities. Spatial growth sucks shopping away from downtown for an array of reasons, including cost and availability of parking in a car-dependent world.

A principle of the growth religion is that increased opportunity to consume creates more consumption. Downtown Hamilton is in even more trouble than downtown Tauranga, but a rescue proposal is currently being drawn up. The solution? To build a new mall downtown (i.e. more growth). Apparently, another 30 to 50 shops in a struggling marketplace will create enough more business to save everybody. Hmmmm.

Count the dead shops in Main Street Palmerston North and Lower Hutt, both of which have already tried this experiment.

Security. With growth, our current economic system delivers wider income gaps and more disadvantaged people. Increased security costs follow for those who have, relative to the increasing numbers of those who have not. If growth delivered broader prosperity for all, then there would be fewer disadvantaged people and less need for security. Reality says growth has not delivered a safer world.

Taxes and debt. What do you know? Despite the much trumpeted economic benefits of the Greater Auckland amalgamation, one of the first acts of the new Auckland Council was to increase rates. Our own rates go up constantly, along with council debt. For 30+ years we have progressively handed over the costs of infrastructure development to our children, arguing that growth will devalue their costs. Well, those debts are now unsustainable and we are the inheriting children.

There is no question that growth will benefit someone. For example, government likes growth because it spreads infrastructure costs across more people and generates more tax. Developers like growth because their business depends on it. Markets like growth because it boosts profits.

The reality is that growth delivers wealth to a few, and costs to many. Growth has delivered leaky houses, finance company failures, overfishing, crowded prisons, polluted estuaries and much more. It reduces our quality of life through destroying the very things that we love most about living in the Bay – natural systems, a beautiful landscape, productive soils and healthy people.

It is a simple fact that growth has not delivered prosperity. It is time we focussed on consolidation, on building quality, on protecting our natural assets, on reducing our economic footprint and on paying our way today. Let's invest in the people and resources we already have, and stop obsessing about attracting more.

There is no question but that we need a new prophet.