■ A decade ago, a story took hold about provincial New Zealand. In 2014, the economist Shamubeel Eaqub gave it its sharpest line, calling parts of the country “zombie towns” and suggesting the kindest thing might be to let some of them close and help people follow the work to the cities. The National government never said it out loud, but its policies pointed the same way, writes Bay of Plenty Kohi Māori ward councillor Dr Mawera Karetai

Growth came from scale and from the big urban centres, and the state’s job was not to prop up places the market had moved past. The headlines did the rest.

At the time it felt premature, even insulting. The regions were doing fine.

Dairy was booming, the mills were busy, and when Covid came the provinces arguably weathered it better than the tourist-dependent cities.

The zombie town line looked like a clever phrase reality had refused to honour.

A decade on, it is getting harder to dismiss. The losses have not arrived as one dramatic collapse. They have come as a slow drip, each one mourned and then quietly folded into the new normal.

Norske Skog closed its doors in 2021 resulting in 160 redundancies, in a district where it had been the largest private employer for decades.

Winstone Pulp shut its Tangiwai and Karioi sites in 2024. In 2025, Kinleith’s last paper machine fell silent at Tokoroa, about 230 jobs gone, and Carter Holt Harvey closed its plywood plant soon after, in a town effectively built around the mill and the forest that fed it.

Almost every closure has the same pattern. A foreign owner runs the numbers, decides the plant cannot compete with cheaper production offshore, and walks.

And every time the real damage runs well past the headline figure, into the contractors, the engineering firms and the households whose incomes quietly depended on the gate staying open.

Food on tables and a roof over the heads of local families are at risk, and there is less money circulating in local communities. Businesses close and things get grim.

So, the uncomfortable question: Were the prophets right, and simply early?

Partly. The direction of travel was real, and pretending otherwise has not served us. But the two forces that will decide the next decade are only now arriving, and they are going to arrive together.

The first is artificial intelligence, walking into the physical world as humanoid robots.

For years these were a viral demo and little else. Not anymore.

In 2026 they are working real shifts in real factories overseas, for BMW, for Hyundai, for Tesla, while China’s makers ship them by the thousand at a fraction of the Western price.

Right now, they are still expensive and still limited, but with the mind-blowing investment that is turning video into physical intelligence, the progression in capability is rapid.

Robotics’ startups raised $13.8 billion in 2025, up from $7.8 billion in 2024, and in 2026 the sector has already pulled in $18.8 billion, with more than six months still to run, beating both 2025 and the previous 2021 peak.

The decisive moment is the cost crossover, when a robot costs less than a year of a worker’s wages.

Most credible forecasts put that between 2028 and 2030.

After that the economics flip, firms rent rather than buy, and adoption accelerates. Think of where electric cars sat at around 2013.

Proven, improving, and on the edge of mainstream.

The benefits are real, which is exactly why it will happen.

Humanoids do the dirty, dull and dangerous work that wears human bodies out. They do not tire, do not get injured, and do not need the night off.

They answer a genuine problem: an ageing population, shrinking workforces, and chronic shortages in the trades, in processing and in care.

For a country that has long struggled to lift productivity in precisely those sectors, the appeal is obvious.

The catch is that the work humanoids do best is the work that still anchors our towns.

The mill floor, the pack house, the orchard, the line. We will not build these machines here. We will import them, the way we now import the paper Kinleith used to make.

The gains will flow to capitals and to the big firms. The displaced labour will be disproportionately regional, and disproportionately Māori.

Now layer climate on top. The Eastern Bay is among the most exposed places in the country. Whakatāne, Ōpōtiki and the low-lying rural settlements live with rising seas, bigger floods, and the slow retreat of insurance and lending from at-risk land. Edgecumbe in 2017 and the East Coast after Gabrielle were not freak events, but previews of what is to come.

Much of the most vulnerable land, and much of the forestry now caught between carbon and timber, is Māori land. The same communities losing the work also face the rising cost of simply staying put.

If you wanted to argue that people should leave, automation and climate are about to hand you the numbers.

This is where I part company with the prophets, because drift is not the only option, and connection to land has an immeasurable value.

We can choose differently, and it’s time for community-based conversation about the options.

Anchor new industry to the one advantage few places on earth can match: the geothermal heat at Kawerau, which can power processing and data infrastructure that automation actually rewards.

Back Māori landowners to develop energy, high-value horticulture and food on the whenua rather than watching it slide into pine.

Fund a genuine regional transition, the way Taranaki was promised one, so that when a mill closes the response is reinvestment and retraining, not a redundancy cheque and a one-way ticket to the city.

Land, water and renewable energy are exactly what the next economy is short of, and we are sitting on them.

By 2036, we could be looking back and asking the unforgivable question: Was “let them fail” an honest reading of a trend we could not stop, or did it become self-fulfilling because we chose to believe it?

A town starved of investment because it has been written off will, of course, decline.

The prophecy stated as fact by the people who lead us can too easily become a forgone conclusion.

For our communities the deeper truth is more simple: The prophets may yet be proven right about the trend.

The question that will matter is whether we were right to accept it.

Oh, and please stop leaving crumbs for our local retailers – buy local and save our services.