4 December 2012

Auckland retains third Mercer Quality of Living spot

Auckland has maintained its position as the world’s third most liveable city in the 2012 Mercer Quality of Living survey, and is the highest ranked city in the Asia-Pacific region.

Auckland features in the top 10 across all three major international quality of life surveys: Mercer (3rd), Monocle magazine (9th) and the Economist Intelligence Unit (10th), ranked on factors such as culture and environment, political stability, safety, infrastructure and ease of doing business.

Mercer ranks Auckland third behind Vienna and Zurich. The highest ranking Asia-Pacific cities after Auckland are Sydney at 10, Wellington at 13, Melbourne at 17 and Perth at 21.

While Auckland sits third overall, it only manages 43rd position when it comes to infrastructure.

“I’m pleased to see that Auckland has maintained its place in the Mercer survey,” says Len Brown. “We know there is still a lot of work to be done. Our transport infrastructure puts us behind other cities on the international indices, and handicaps our people and our economy.

“But we are working hard to give Auckland a fully-integrated transport system, and steps like rail electrification and next year’s arrival of our first of our new electric trains, protecting and designating the route for the City Rail Link, and our integrated ticketing system roll-out will make a significant positive impact.”

The international results complement the annual Auckland Scorecard, introduced by the Mayor in 2011 to enable Auckland to gauge its performance across a range of measures including employment, education, the local economy and transport .

The second annual scorecard, released last month, has revealed Auckland is making solid progress towards becoming the world’s most liveable city.

“Auckland’s consistent high ranking in the three major international liveability surveys shows the world sees us as a great place to live, work, visit and do business. The Auckland Scorecard is tailored to measure factors important to Aucklanders and to achieving our future goals, to give a balanced domestic view to the international one,” says the Mayor.

“Our performance across all these shows that we are well on track to becoming the world’s most liveable city, a place where all Aucklanders can enjoy a good quality of life, where there are good business and employment opportunities, where people have real choices in housing, transport and employment.”

“A key thing that cities topping the lists have in common is that they have formulated robust plans for their future social, physical and economic development, and are fully committing to delivering them.

“The success of this approach is clear, and Auckland is well now positioned with our Auckland Plan 30-year blueprint, the Economic Development Strategy, the Housing Strategic Action Plan and now progressing the Unitary Plan, the single rulebook replacing former district and regional plans.”

ENDS

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