Guest editorial: An airport in Wānaka!
A frog sitting in slowly warming water won’t notice the change – and will eventually be boiled dead. Whereas if it jumped into hot water, it would immediately jump out.
The draft Queenstown Airport Masterplan resembles the parable of the slowly cooked frog. Sometimes a counterfactual example can help jolt our thinking, much as hot water jolts the frog’s senses.
The image above presents one such jolt. It shows the hypothetical where we have overlaid Queenstown Airport onto the Wānaka Spatial Plan and carefully matched the size and scale to reflect its air noise boundaries accurately.
Topographically, Wānaka and Frankton Flats are similar, with the lakefront about 1.3 km wide and hills rising on either side. And both are major urban centres in the district’s Spatial Plan.
We’d expect colossal opposition to establishing such an airport in Wānaka – not just from the community and broader public but also from every expert and organisation in urban and infrastructure planning.
And for good reason. It would severely impact the town of Wānaka. No one would see this benefiting the town’s hospitality sector or helping to diversify the economy by attracting knowledge enterprises. It would confound every effort to consolidate and intensify future development at Wānaka, forcing it to disperse and sprawl further afield.
Yet, this is what’s happening on Frankton Flats. Compared to Wānaka, Frankton Flats already has more than twice the number of homes. It has several times more retail and office space, professional services, and hospitality businesses than Wānaka.
In addition to numerous preschool, after-school and tertiary education centres, four schools on Frankton Flats total over 2,000 students. There are many medical centres and a hospital, with another 2 km off the end of the airport’s runway.
Thousands of people live directly under the flight path at the end of the runway, with those in Shotover Country and Lakes Hayes Estate bound by no-complaint covenants on their property titles. This means they are not allowed to complain or submit in opposition to any consultation process on airport plans.
It’s obvious that locating an airport in Wānaka, as shown in the hypothetical image, would be catastrophic for residents’ social and economic well-being. It would be the antithesis of an effective climate mitigation strategy, undermining every effort towards low-emissions central urban density or economic diversification to the low-emissions knowledge sector.
The Carbon Zero by 2030 tourism commitment by Destination Queenstown, Lake Wānaka Tourism and Council includes visitor travel emissions. That commitment requires reduced flight emissions, which at this stage implies fewer international visitors. As the ink dries on that strategy, Queenstown Airport announces a $350 million debt-fuelled expansion that extends its international capacity and that of private jets. Join the dots.
Queenstown Airport is no longer in the right place. The Spatial Plan sees the Frankton Flats becoming the district’s principal metropolitan centre. As the district’s resident population doubles, it could become the best place in the world to live and work. A fully integrated high-density powerhouse for thriving low-emissions, high-paid knowledge industries.
QAC is a community-owned, Council controlled corporation. Developing the district’s largest CBD would make it a goldmine for ratepayers and help solve accommodation affordability, transport, and economic dependence on tourism with its low wages and high emissions. Instead, QAC’s Masterplan would do the opposite while creating a $350 million debt.
Considering the hypothetical proposal of an airport in Wānaka clarifies what’s happening in Frankton – the slow-boiling of the frog. And a failing climate strategy.
