Work crisis due to lack of affordable housing
I AM not surprised that Queenstown businesses are in crisis because they cannot fill vacancies in the service and hospitality industry. It doesn’t matter how attractive the financial incentives are to come to live and work here, if there is a lack of affordable housing, then people will have no choice but to leave the area and look elsewhere.
Housing is a key determinant for attraction and retention of qualified staff and their families.
I am an ‘‘essential’’ worker, and was excited to take up a role in Queenstown at the beginning of 2022.
My husband, two young children and I now find ourselves shut out of the longterm rental housing market. I can only speculate that since the borders have opened, property owners are pursuing more ‘‘lucrative’’ shortterm tenants. It is shortsighted to promote Queenstown as a tourist destination, because, in the long term, tourism will not be sustainable if the people who service the industry aren’t able to live here.
The bottom line is that attracting and retaining skilled and professional staff to Queenstown is critical if it is to remain vibrant and selfsufficient, and hence able to sustain itself into the future. I am saddened that because we can not secure quality rental accommodation, my family may have to leave. If the housing situation in Queenstown is not addressed with urgency, then the social and economic impact will be farreaching and significant.
Sophie Hazlehurst Queenstown
Transgender
THANK you for including a transgender voice in the Otago Daily
Earlier this week we saw an individual's transphobic fantasies expressed to city councillors regarding changing room use at Moana Pool.
It was an attempt to create hysteria and fear around trans people, disguised as feminism. I'm so proud that Charlotte Goodyear, a member of the rainbow community and regular user of Moana Pool, could share with us what her experience is like. Charlotte confirmed Moana Pool's statement that there are no problems with trans people having a swim and getting dried afterwards — other than feeling a bit selfconscious, like many of us do in changing rooms.
It's a shame we have to fight what isn't even an issue, but I'm glad the ODT has taken this step forward.
Dudley Benson Woof! bar Dunedin
I ENJOYED your story on Charlotte Goodyear (ODT, 29.7.22) and the rather nonevent of transgender people using bathrooms at Moana Pool. As a 75year old woman with decades of feminist activism under my belt, I want to say that I have no problem whatsoever with sharing changing rooms with a transgender woman. Good on you Charlotte.
Sue McLaughlin
Opoho
THE denial of physical and biological reality has become the politically correct fashion among the Western political class.
From our good Mayor Hawkins denying that women need and deserve their own intimate spaces to EU leaders believing that they can humiliate a superpower like Russia in Russia’s own backyard, to the absurd notion that EVs requiring massive resource extraction will save the environment, evidence shows that the West has lost touch.
Now the Netherlands and Canada are attacking farmers’ ability to use fertiliser to generate the crop yields desperately needed by a hungry global population.
Will Western leaders reconsider their politically correct fetishes when Europe shivers in the dark this Christmas while the lights stay on and warm in China and Russia?
Tat Loo
Mosgiel