The government just announced homeless move-on orders for all town centres, not just Auckland. National policy, applied everywhere equally. But when you look at where government agencies actually put their money, the story is very different.

Over the past year, government departments issued 25,054 procurement tenders. Of those, 2,938 were tagged to Auckland and 2,574 to Canterbury. Together, those two regions captured nearly a quarter of all government tender activity. (Source: MBIE, procurement)

Then the numbers drop off a cliff. Wellington, home to most government departments, managed 2,047 tenders. Waikato got 1,770. Otago scraped 1,765. By the time you reach Northland, you're down to 1,111 tenders for the entire year.

This isn't about population size alone. Auckland has roughly three times the population of Otago, but gets less than twice the tender activity. Canterbury, with half Auckland's population, is nearly level with it in government procurement. The distribution doesn't follow census numbers. It follows something else: infrastructure, existing supplier networks, and proximity to decision-makers.

The pattern matters because procurement tenders represent real spending commitments. Every tender is a contract for goods, services, or construction work. When a region gets 2,574 tenders versus 1,111, that's not paperwork. That's jobs, business revenue, and economic activity flowing to one place instead of another.

Northland, which appears at the bottom of this list, has roughly the same population as the Manawatu-Wanganui region. Yet Manawatu-Wanganui secured 1,472 tenders compared to Northland's 1,111. The difference: 361 government contracts that went elsewhere.

This comes at a time when household spending has frozen under the weight of rising costs. When families can't spend, government spending becomes more important, not less. It's one of the few levers that can keep regional economies moving when consumer demand stalls.

The data doesn't tell us whether this distribution is deliberate policy or just inertia. But it does show the reality: government departments talk about serving all regions equally, then concentrate their actual spending in a handful of places. The rest get national policies applied to them, without the economic activity that comes with being where the money flows.