What’s Northland worth to Auckland and the rest of New Zealand? Are we delivering? And why must we still make the case for better infrastructure in our region?

In this week’s episode of the True North podcast we speak with Julian Smith, group secretary of the Northland Corporate Group, about a report it launched in Wellington today. It maintains that Northland has the potential to contribute much more significantly to economic growth in New Zealand generally, and to Auckland in particular. But only if there is continued investment in connectivity –transport, energy and telecoms - in the region.

It says Northland could conceivably boost its forecast GDP for 2050 by 50 percent, or an additional $20 billion, to a whopping $60 billion – but only if potential investors here are given the certainty and confidence they need in core infrastructure to unleash $38 billion dollars in latent capital investment.