SOUTHERN ALPS FEEL THE HEAT
Once isolated, high country of New Zealand faces housing crisis and environmental pressures.
Back in the 1980s, the wild alpine beauty of New Zealand’s Southern Alps was a winter haunt for hardy skiers, deer hunters and trekkers. Summer, with the snow gone, would empty the region’s two main towns, Queenstown and Wanaka. Today, the private jets parked at Queenstown airport year-round and the growing hordes of thrill-seeking travellers testify to the metamorphosis of this snowy former backwater.
World-class skiing, breathtaking scenery and extreme adventure tourism from bungee jumping to paragliding and jetboating have helped to turn the area — located in the southwest of New Zealand’s South Island — into one of the world’s leading destinations for affluent foreign visitors, especially Australians, Chinese and Americans.
In addition to its high mountains, the area offers world heritage sites such as Milford Sound — a huge and dramatic fjord — and magical dark skies with unrivaled views of the Milky Way. Billionaires have moved into bolt-holes beside fabulous mountain lakes, which have featured in epic movies such as the Lord of the Rings trilogy.
Car manufacturers test prototype models in the area’s snow-covered mountains, and resorts provide perfect locations for high-security meetings; most recently for chiefs of the “Five Eyes” intelligence network, encompassing the US, Britain, Canada, Australia and New Zealand.
Snow is a core business in Queenstown with four major downhill skiing destinations, all offering natural powder snow, backed up by arrays of artificial snow makers. Coronet Peak, the original slope just 25 minutes from the centre of Queenstown, offers 280 hectares of skiable area. Another site at Cardrona benefits from high elevation and faces south, ensuring plentiful dry natural snow.
Cross-country skiers are catered to by fleets of helicopters ferrying tourists to isolated peaks and glaciers. Queenstown’s annual winter games also stand as one of the world’s biggest competitive ski and snowboard competitions.
In 2016, a total of 3.5 million tourists entered New Zealand, which has a population of just 4.7 million. The Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment says visitor numbers will rise to 4.9 million by 2023. Australia in 2016 provided the most tourists at 1.4 million, worth NZ$2.4 billion (US$1.6 billion) to the local economy. China, with 410,000 visitors worth NZ$1.6 billion, is expected to be the top earner by 2023, with a forecast of 913,000 visitors spending NZ$4.3 billion.
On the 3.2 million visitors a year that call at Queenstown, 70% are foreign tourists, according to Destination Queenstown. In the year to June 2017, Australian tourists spent NZ$475 million in Queenstown, followed by Americans at NZ$222 million and Chinese at NZ$220 million.
The Chinese outbound travel agent Qyer has opened its first southern hemisphere shopfront in the town. Tourism New Zealand has partnered with the Beijing Ski Association and Air China to promote Queenstown as “the perfect counter season ski destination for Chinese skiers”.
China has legacy in Queenstown. Chinese miners arrived in 1866 for the first gold rush and within six years there were 3,500 Chinese, living mostly in the nearby settlement of Arrowtown. After the gold ran out, many moved to the coastal city of Dunedin.
HOUSING CRISIS
Discreet holiday homes have long existed in the Southern Alps — the Sultan of Brunei once had a house in the area, as did the children of Suharto, the former president of Indonesia, and Canadian country music superstar Shania Twain purchased 25,000 hectares of high-country land in 2004. But the number of wealthy foreigners owning property in the area is rising — in some cases because of fears about the mercurial behaviour of US President Donald Trump.
The New Yorker reported in January that New Zealand had become a favourite hideaway for rich Americans worried about the future of their country. The magazine quoted Robert Johnson, head of the Institute for New Economic Thinking, as saying that “hedge-fund managers all over the world ... are buying airstrips and farms in places like New Zealand because they think they need a getaway”.
Citing growing interest among Americans and other nationalities, Stacy Coburn, head of Bayleys Real Estate in Queenstown, told local media that the area “is seen as a bolthole for the future if things do turn to the worse in the world”.
The most controversial buyer has been Peter Thiel, the billionaire American co-founder of PayPal and Facebook. In April 2015, he bought a 193-hectare lake-side estate for NZ$14.5 million, a purchase revealed this year after Thiel became an adviser to Donald Trump. The story blew up into a major political row during the last local election campaign in June when it was revealed Thiel had been given New Zealand citizenship, allowing him to buy the land.
The Department of Internal Affairs published documents showing Thiel had spent only 12 days in New Zealand and didn’t plan to settle. Then opposition Labour Party immigration spokesman Iain Lees-Galloway said citizenship had been traded for money and was unacceptable.
“We pride ourselves on having an open and transparent system of government, so this situation feels very uncomfortable for most New Zealanders,” he said.
Then-Prime Minister Bill English defended Thiel’s citizenship. “New Zealand is a better place with Mr Thiel as a citizen,” he said. Thiel had invested in Xero, a successful New Zealand software accountancy firm.
ENVIRONMENTAL RISKS
The key question for the region’s future, however, lies in growing concerns about the risks imposed by tourism and development to the region’s pristine environment. The government is considering ways of charging foreigners seeking to walk in the high country, to ease overcrowding on increasingly heavily used tracks, and there are worries about the future of the kea, the world’s only truly alpine parrot.
The curious and playful kea often comes into contact with tourists, but its numbers are small — between 3,000 and 7,000, according to the Department of Conservation, which lists the bird as an endangered species. The much-loved animal was voted “bird of the year” in an online poll run by the Royal Forest and Bird Protection Society.
New Zealand held its breath last month when two keas were found sick by the Department of Conservation, which monitors the population. A police car was used to speed them to a city clinic 500km away in Christchurch, where they were found to be suffering from lead poisoning after eating the heads of old roofing nails. Wananga and Kerewa survived but their ordeal illustrates the growing pressures on the environment.
Nature may yet have the last word. Queenstown lies just 70km east of the Alpine Fault, one of the world’s major geological features, which runs in a nearly straight line for 600km down the spine of the South Island, and is easily visible from space.
GNS Science, a New Zealand government agency, says the fault has ruptured four times in the past 900 years, and is experiencing horizontal movement of about 30 metres per 1,000 years — very fast by global standards.
“The Alpine Fault has a high probability (estimated at 30%) of rupturing in the next 50 years,” the agency added.
“The rupture will produce one of the biggest earthquakes since European settlement of New Zealand, and it will have a major impact on the lives of many people.”
Not such a great bolthole after all, perhaps.
The number of wealthy foreigners owning property near Queenstown is rising — in some cases because of fears about the mercurial behaviour of Donald Trump