The ongoing debate over how to handle rapidly growing airline traffic into Queenstown and Central Otago throws up long-term questions which, depending on how they are answered, could alter the South forever.
Demand for flights into the region is rising rapidly. The Queenstown Airport Corporation wants to accommodate that demand through expansions to its Queenstown and Wanaka airports.
Locals are not enthused by that plan and neither is Air New Zealand, which is pushing for a new Central Otago airport — an idea with a price tag likely in the billions.
No matter what outcome is settled on, it will include big compromises and big spending. While no answer will suit everyone, perhaps we should be striving for one tailored specifically to those not-yet born.
Population growth is a strange animal. In some environments it seems lethargic and unwilling, in others it seems virulent and uncontrollable.
There are many reasons for that, of course, but one truism is that humans, like all life, tend not to expend more energy than is necessary. A settlement built on easy-to-develop land will likely grow bigger, quicker, than one built on difficult land.
But where economic gains are worth the extra energy, humans will settle anywhere.
Queenstown, despite its beauty, would not have attracted the number of people it did in the 1860s if it was not for the riches available in the surrounding goldfields.
Indeed, once the gold was gone, the town’s population plummeted and stayed small for decades. Only with the relatively recent tourism boom has the population grown again.
But it was never a town destined for easy expansion. Towns in mountain regions, book-ended by lakes, rivers and gorges, seldom are. Even so, it is growing now, as is New Zealand as a whole, with a natural population growth of some 30,000 every year and net migration adding more than 70,000 people in the year to July 2017. Like compounding interest, it is likely those numbers will continue to rise and Otago will change accordingly.
If, in a few hundred years’ time, Otago has a few million more people living in it than it does today, where will they be? Clinging to the steep inclines around Lake Wakatipu? Spread along the only remaining flat land near Dunedin — the fertile and flood-prone Taieri Plain?
When would the right time to plan for better alternatives be? After we’ve invested buckets of cash trying to make Queenstown and Wanaka’s airports something they were never planned to be?
While a sacrilegious thought to some, a major international airport could easily fit into the plains of Central Otago.
So could a sizeable city, for that matter. A city boasting four seasons of show-stopping weather and renowned nearby leisure activities. A city with the most advanced design standards, where compact modern housing would ensure the effects of cold winters were negligible.
A city planned, from the outset, to accommodate growth. A connected city with direct, fast, links, including tunnels and bridges, to the historic port of Dunedin and the international resort of Queenstown. A city with nearby dairy, wine, fruit, gold and forestry industries.
Of course, such an idea is far-fetched. Yet New Zealand will need new solutions to tackle what will only become an ever-growing population.
Most of our existing settlements, especially in the South, are located where they are because historic sources of economic activities demanded it. They were not planned for, nor are they suitable for, significant growth.
The burgeoning airport debate, then, is more significant than just in terms of accommodating tourism numbers and irritating flight paths.
As part of a growing, thriving, modern first-world country, it is likely another million people will eventually reside in the South, whether we plan for it or not and however unpalatable it may seem to some.
Perhaps it is time to think long-term and ensure we are ready for that future.
