The provinces are abolished

The New Zealand Constitution Act 1852 created six provinces around the main settlements: Auckland, New Plymouth (later renamed Taranaki), Wellington, Nelson, Canterbury and Otago. Each had an elected council and an elected chief official, the superintendent. Under the 'compact of 1856' the provinces received all the revenue from Crown land sales and three-eighths of the customs revenue, and used it for colonisation: organising immigration, building roads and later railways, and settling land. Te Ara notes they resembled federal states in their relative autonomy. The New Provinces Act 1858 allowed outlying districts to break away, and Hawke's Bay, Marlborough and Southland provinces were set up between 1858 and 1861. Westland, made a county in 1868, was given provincial status in 1873. Julius Vogel described provincialism as a product of how the colony was settled: 'It was an ambitious effort to attempt to settle the colony from so many points.'

The provinces' finances weakened in the 1860s. The colony borrowed £3 million to pay for the Waikato war, and in 1867 Colonial Treasurer William Fitzherbert consolidated provincial loans and stopped the provinces from borrowing. In 1868 the colony's revenue fell for the first time. When Julius Vogel launched his borrowing programme in 1870, every province except Otago and Canterbury was in financial difficulty; Southland and Marlborough were bankrupt, and Southland was re-annexed to Otago. From 1871 the colonial government took over direct management of immigration and much of the North Island's public works. In 1873 the provinces killed Vogel's proposal to reserve some provincial 'waste' land as forest, fearing they would lose future land revenue. Vogel concluded that the success of his policy demanded the abolition of at least the northern provinces.

In 1874 Vogel announced a plan to abolish the North Island provinces. When Parliament met in 1875 the government extended this to all of them, by then nine in number, and the second reading of the bill was carried 52–17. The superintendents of Taranaki, Hawke's Bay and Nelson voted in favour. The main opposition came from Auckland, led by former governor George Grey, who had become its superintendent, and from Otago under Superintendent James Macandrew. According to the 1966 Encyclopaedia of New Zealand, Vogel was in England raising a loan while Harry Atkinson took the bill through. Vogel said the provinces had broken down 'because of their coming into conflict with the colonial government on many points, and especially on points of finance.' Abolition was delayed until after an election, which returned a majority for it everywhere except Auckland and Otago, and took effect on 1 November 1876. The Counties Act 1876 divided rural areas into counties; towns carried on unchanged.

George Grey became premier in 1877 but did not restore the provinces. Instead he centralised the land fund. The provinces had run different systems of land sales, schooling and charitable aid, and new laws in 1877 and 1885 standardised these across the country; the Education Act 1877 was one of them. Provincial police forces were absorbed into the colonial constabulary. Te Ara notes that areas where Māori kept effective control, such as the King Country (to 1884) and Te Urewera (to around 1920), outlasted the Pākehā provinces. The old boundaries persisted as 'provincial districts', used for statistics until the 1950s, and land districts and education boards largely followed them.