Context
QAC seeks Council’s endorsement of its $350 million Queenstown Airport master plan, including terminal renovations, new concrete aprons, runway resurfacing, new taxiways, new vehicle parking, and separate new terminuses for helicopter and fixed wing general aviation.
With QAC’s commitment to paying Council annual dividends, new debt is to fund most of the Master Plan expenditure.
We are concerned that Council’s endorsement of the Master Plan could be taken as carte blanche approval for the full $350 million expenditure. This presents an unacceptable risk that Council could be left with a loss-making redundant asset if the proposed Central Otago Airport goes ahead, and airlines transfer their schedules to the new airport.
We support the views expressed by We Love Whakatipu Incorporated in their public forum submission and publish it here with permission.
QLDC full council meeting
November 16, 2023
Kia ora, everyone. I’m Cath Gilmour of We Love Whakatipu Incorporated Society.
You will have all yesterday received an email from me with the submission made by airline industry representatives to QAC’s draft Master Plan and the response from QAC’s CEO.
And in front of you now, just in case you didn’t have time to read it, are copies of the same, outlining the perspective of all four airlines that fly into ZQN on the $350 million development program you’re being asked to endorse today.
Many of the questions they ask are questions that We Love Whakatipu has already been asking.
In your QAC governance role, these are questions you should also be asking. And making sure you get meaningful answers rather than pro-growth spin.
Because the consequences for us all are serious.
Not just in over-tourism and its multiple negative impacts, but also in unsustainable debt at a time you are already closing in on your debt ceilings with liabilities for leaky buildings, leaky pipes, et cetera et cetera still on the horizon.
It was this airline submission that finally saw Glen Sowry drop his pretence that the “active listening” claimed by QAC would extend beyond 2032.
As his response to the airline industry quite clearly states, “the current noise boundaries are not a fixed geographic or permanent legal constraint”.
When asked at a Frankton consultation meeting some months ago what happens when they’re reached, he said he didn’t know as he would be retired by then.
But I do note his comment (in his response to the airline submission) that “submitting to limitless growth in turbocharged tourism is considered an outdated approach and is not supported by stakeholders in this region.”
And yet extrapolating QAC’s supposedly “modest” 3.2% annual growth beyond the plan’s foreshortened horizon, we find ourselves at exactly the number we rejected back in 2018 – around the same as Christchurch International Airport quotes in its Central Otago Regional Airport proposal.
On which note – I understand you’ve still not commissioned a SWOT analysis of the proposed airport. It is hard to understand why not because Tarras would offer shorter flights from Australia, fewer turnarounds due to windshear, lower carbon emissions, and a much better safety profile than ZQN.
Which are no doubt some of the reasons then-Air New Zealand CEO Christopher Luxon pushed for a new Central Otago regional airport in the face of QAC’s 2018 plans.
So, I urge you to please not greenlight the entire $350 million Master Plan. Expenditures should be stepped and council should have a gatekeeping role on expenditure, perhaps through approval of such steps through the LTP.
CIAL is due to decide on going ahead on resource consent next year – any growth-oriented development work should not happen until at least after this.
If CIAL push the go button, then we will know whether it is going to go ahead within 3 to 4 years.
As the airline industry submission says, airlines should not be asked to fund such Capex when faced with a potentially ‘end of life’ airport. And nor should our community.
I am heartened to see QAC’s comment (in the schedule of Master Plan changes included in today’s agenda) agreeing with We Love Whakatipu’s stance that “long-term provision of aviation infrastructure in New Zealand should be a wider conversation, led by central government and taking into account all views of affected communities. It should not be led by a single district or airport company.”
And council should not today endorse QAC’s master plan to fund growth way beyond the parameters of that conversation.
Thank you.