The government just announced homeless move-on orders for all town centres, not just Auckland. But here's a question nobody's asking: where is all that government money actually going?

Last year, government agencies put out 25,054 tenders for goods and services. Of those, 2,938 went to Auckland. That's nearly 12% of all government procurement activity concentrated in one region. (Source: MBIE, procurement)

Canterbury, the second-largest region, received 2,574 tenders. Wellington got 2,047. The gap between Auckland and everywhere else isn't small. It's a chasm.

This matters because government procurement is how taxpayer money flows into local economies. Every tender is a job, a contract, a business that wins or loses. When Auckland gets 364 more tenders than Canterbury, that's not just numbers on a spreadsheet. That's work, wages, and economic activity that goes to one place instead of another.

The pattern holds across the country. Waikato received 1,770 tenders. Otago got 1,765. These are major regions with significant populations, yet they're competing for roughly 60% of what Auckland alone receives.

Even more striking: Northland received just 1,111 tenders. That's a region where poverty rates are high, where infrastructure is crumbling, where the government is now planning to move homeless people away from town centres. Yet it gets less than 40% of Auckland's tender activity.

The timing is brutal. Soaring bills are putting household spending on ice, as RNZ reported this week. Regional New Zealand is feeling the squeeze harder than anywhere. And government procurement, one of the few economic levers that can be deliberately directed to struggling regions, remains stubbornly concentrated in Auckland.

This isn't about Auckland doing something wrong. It's about where government agencies choose to spend money when they have a choice. Every tender has a location. Every contract goes somewhere. The data shows where: Auckland, then a significant drop, then everyone else.

Manawatu-Wanganui got 1,472 tenders. Bay of Plenty received 1,307. Hawke's Bay, still recovering from Cyclone Gabrielle, got 1,132. These aren't trivial regions. They're home to hundreds of thousands of Kiwis who need work, infrastructure, and economic opportunity.

The government can announce all the move-on orders it wants. But if the economic activity that comes from government spending continues to flow disproportionately to one region, the rest of the country will keep falling further behind. The tender data doesn't lie. Auckland gets nearly three thousand opportunities. Northland gets barely a third of that. That's the story of regional inequality in 25,054 numbers.