Costs more than benefits. Deputy Mayor accidentally reveals Queenstown’s biggest problem.

The numbers don't add up to build new Southern Lakes infrastructure

During the rather chaotic debate about the Queenstown Lakes District Council’s doomed new office building deputy mayor Quentin Smith accidentally stated in plain language what we’ve all been suspecting for decades – and it’s Queenstown’s very large and apparently uncontrollable elephant in the room.

We need more cash than we are worth.

Or as Quentin Smith put it to the QLDC’s new office building consultants – “So in all of these cases the costs outweigh the benefits?”

The consultants agreed.

The more residents have a chance to think about this – the more evident it becomes. And a tourist tax won’t be nearly enough to fix the problem.

An easy way to understand this is the very sophisticated, but sometimes grid locked, motorway network around Auckland.

There’re expensive tunnels, overpasses, bridges, sometimes four lanes in both directions – everything. But Auckland’s not growing as fast as Queenstown. And per capita they have fewer tourists than we do.

So how was the decision to invest so much in Auckland’s motorway network made?

Put simply, all of those people in those Auckland cars earn more on average and pay more tax than Southern Lakes people. So – at an equally simple level – it’s worth building a motorway network to get them to work – plus advanced bus lanes that carry high capacity double-deck buses past the sometimes grid locked traffic.