This crisis hurts but it is not like war
‘‘TOURISM ‘bloodbath’” was the headline across the ODT’s front page on April 22. Queenstown Lakes Mayor Jim Boult was quoted below: ‘‘The reality is business in Queenstown — no matter what you’re doing — is going to be a bit of a bloodbath for a while.”
Queenstown, having put almost all its eggs in the fragile, destructive basket of mass tourism, is facing a painful dose of reality as a result of Covid19 and its effect on travel. Mr Boult suspects local unemployment might reach 25%30%: by April 21,
4500 people had lost their jobs in the area, and 6800 registered for emergency assistance.
Mr Boult is right to air his district’s problems, to seek shortterm assistance for individuals and businesses (businesses must be realistic about the future, though), and to flag the need for review of New Zealand’s longterm tourism policy. But it’s not a ‘‘bloodbath’’.
If Mr Boult stood by his letterbox at 6am on April 25, as an alternative to attending the cancelled Anzac Day dawn services, he could have reflected on real ‘‘bloodbaths’’.
He could have thought of New Zealanders and Australians landing at Anzac Cove 105 years before, staining sea, beach, and scrub covered hills above with their blood.
Of October 12, 1917, when 843 New Zealand soldiers died in a futile attack on Bellevue Spur during the Passchendaele campaign.
Or of the night of February 1718, 1944, when the A and B Companies of 28 (Maori) Battalion suffered 128 out of 200 men killed or wounded in an unsuccessful attack on the Cassino railway station.
To describe the commercial realities for Queenstown, harsh though they are, as a ‘‘bloodbath”, especially four days before Anzac Day, when New Zealand formally remembers those who literally had their blood spilled in the cruel waste of war, is, to be polite, crudely insensitive.
The changes in Queenstown, and elsewhere, are painful, and will become more so (Queenstown’s, surely, were inevitable eventually though, as climate change forced cutbacks in mass international travel). But those suffering from business collapses are still alive, not dead.
And the Government can help them (who wants ‘‘small government’’ now?), with policies to support current and new (preferably sustainable) businesses, invest in infrastructure jobs (including public transport), and ensure income is adequate for all, beneficiaries included.
Captain Tom Moore (now 100), originally from Keighley, Yorkshire (it once had a good secondhand book shop, and is about 12 miles, as the crow flies, from the tiny village of Rylstone, known for its women’s fundraising for leukaemia research with a nude calendar, inspiring the Helen Mirren film Calendar Girls),
who served in the Duke of
Wellington’s Regiment during World War 2, attracted worldwide attention with his plan to raise £1000 for the National Health Service (which treated his broken hip and skin cancer) charities by walking 100 laps of his garden before his 100th birthday on April 30. He achieved that by April 16, through a guard of honour from the Yorkshire Regiment (into which the DWR was merged in 2006), but kept going, and by April 29 had raised more than £29.5 million (and topped the charts with a collaborative version of You’ll Never Walk Alone).
The money will fund devices for hospital patients to communicate with families, support for NHS staff rest and recuperation rooms, and groups supporting patients leaving hospital.
The first addresses Covid19 restrictions, which prevent relatives visiting patients in hospital, but the other two purposes reflect needs caused by ‘‘austerity” starvation of the NHS and community care services by recent governments.
British PM Boris Johnson, recently in NHS care, is considering how to recognise Captain Moore’s effort (a knighthood?). Captain Moore might prefer to see longterm adequate funding for the NHS and local care services, not just the present shortterm flood of cash.
As it’s to be hoped that longterm deficiencies in our health system, some underlined by Covid19, will now be addressed by more effective policies and proper funding.