I love these maps, its useful to show folks from both here & abroad how fricking massive New Zealand actually is (relatively).
We have challenging topography which does mean we'll never get a population comparable to Britain or France but its hard not to conclude that we are massively under-populated, and perhaps that puts a fixed limit on our economic possibilities.
Actually, Italy is a good example - they have a long mountainous spine too, and range from Alpine to Coastal same as us.
Waikato is mostly just paddocks. We could easily populate it if we wanted to. Hamilton could be as big as melbourne if we managed water properly.
But we don't know how to do infrastructure in this country.
Was there supposed to be an image here?
Maybe that's the joke.
Ha! In that case, a quality shitpost
For some reason lemmy messed up the link..