Government should control airport planning

COLIN Keel, chief executive of Queenstown Airport Corporation, recently announced that QAC is putting on hold its resource consent application to expand the noise boundaries at Queenstown Airport. Confusingly, given its stated reason of waiting to see what the wider regional development picture is, it is, however, pursuing its work on a Wanaka Airport master plan.

It seems QAC believes it has monopolistic control of airports in Central Otago and has decided a ‘‘dual airport’’ solution is best for it. It is therefore pursuing development of Wanaka Airport regardless of any wider development picture, as it has already protected its position in Wanaka through land purchase and securing prohibitive zoning to surrounding land.

QAC will be the only guaranteed winners in its process. The ‘‘dual airport’’ scenario will lock in profits from the operation of the two airports and from the Wanaka land development windfall, while exposing the local community to uncontrolled growth and the taxpayer to potentially massive roading and infrastructure upgrade costs to link the two airports.

To reclaim the process for the good of the local community and the nation, it is therefore essential that an impartial party such as the Government takes control of the Central Otago airport planning process.

Only after an impartial and transparent analysis of a full range of airport development options, including comprehensive benefit/cost, environmental and social impact analyses, can the public be expected to have any faith in the process and the proposed outcome. Nick Page

Wanaka

The future of the ducks

IN the same edition of the ODT with an opinion piece about plastic straws and bags being only a small part of the plastic problem, there was an article about the deliberate dumping of 5000 plastic ducks into the Leith (15.10.18).

What possible use will 5000 yellow plastic ducks have when the race is over, and will they all be retrieved or left to make their way into the harbour and beyond?

Why not a race using homemade biodegradable ducks?

Sylvia Clarkson

Palmerston [All the ducks were retrieved after the race. — Editor]

Should have been ‘bated’

I READ (ODT, 15.10.18) the Remarkables skifield people are waiting ‘‘with baited breath’’ the extending of their facilities.

The one and only recorded example of this spelling being correct is in Geoffrey Taylor’s poem Cruel Clever Cat:

Sally, having swallowed cheese, Directs down holes the scented breeze, Enticing thus with baited breath

Nice mice to an untimely death.

Mac Gardner

Waverley

Is that really prudent?

I AM not persuaded by your editorial (12.10.18) in which you support the Minister of Finance’s refusal to increase public expenditure in response to the higherthanexpected surplus in the year to June.

Budgets are not only financial documents, they are also moral ones. They incorporate the decisions of the government of the day on a whole series of conscience issues. A decision to fund something is necessarily a decision not to fund something else.

In deciding not to increase expenditure in health, for example, Grant Robertson is choosing to provide more security for the future (necessarily speculative) health needs of the presently healthy majority of us, and thereby choosing not to help the less fortunate minority whose current health needs are to remain unmet for a while longer.

You might consider that prudent: I consider it unconscionable.

Roger Barker

Waikouaiti