Paula Thompson BOP Regional Councillor www.envbop.govt.nz

The recent Rethinking Local Government conference had some great provocative speakers – including professor Natalie Jackson from Waikato University, talking about the realities of New Zealand the Bay of Plenty ‘s demographics. The story quite simply: We're aging.

The growth is in the 65-plus age group and that is mirroring the world wide story. The youth growth is amongst the Maori population. This is the story that our own social gerontologist Carole Gordon has been telling us in the Western BOP for some time.

What Carole has also been urging us for some time is to regard our population ageing ‘growth' as a huge opportunity as over 65's will have a huge influence on markets, capital, labour force, housing, health services, families and communities.

Quite obviously the Maori youth ‘growth ‘also is full of influence and opportunities.

The WBOPL has the opportunity to model 'opportunity taking” for ageing growth. We could do worse than consider establishing a Centre of Excellence for Ageing that focused on all the opportunities. Again, another idea of Carole's.

The challenge is who and how to progress the opportunities. Local Government has a role. That role is to facilitate the discussions and ideas on who and how.

As communities and societies we face extraordinary challenges. We need to turn the challenges to opportunities and that means having people involved in local government that can understand the opportunities and have the skills to facilitate sector and community wide thinking and action.