Rod Drury: "There's a much better way to get things done."

Queenstown's influential entrepreneur reckons councils and consultants are a long way from being the best way to engineer change and improvement in the community.

Rod Drury has kept a medium to low profile since moving to Queenstown from the $20 billion company he founded - Xero. Arguably one of NZ’s most innovative and successful businessman, the NBR calculates his wealth at close to $1.5 billion. The NBR also describes Drury’s new property near Arrowtown, a 2,200 square metre house on 29 hectares of land, where they says there’s a bunker style building for global leaders and top tech execs to meet. He’s a local philanthropist but in this long form interview with Crux he reveals a deep desire not just to contribute to the local community - but change it for the better. He talks about why - and, most importantly, how. The conversation started though around the controversial Coronet Village/Gondola that Rod Drury is linked to.

Crux: So the new mountain bike/gondola, and potentially 780 home village, at the foot of Coronet Peak - who’s original idea was that?

RD: It was interesting actually. 'cause we'd been doing all this conservation work and planting and trail development in the three areas. Mount Dewar, Coronet Peak, and the New Coronet Forest. A friend of mine in Wellington said, ‘Hey, that'd be the perfect place for a gondola’ And I was like, actually, yeah, it is interesting. And so I rang Nigel Kerr who's the ski field manager, and said, ‘Hey, Nigel, what's the latest gondola thinking? And he said, well, funny you should ask, because he'd been approached by Ben (Farrell) the planner on behalf of Bernard Cleary (the landowner) to look at that themselves. 'cause they were looking at ways they can monetise the value of their farm. So I made contact. And so a couple of groups had sort of come up with the idea at the same time.

And so I said I'm kind of interested. I could be a funder of that. And then, the fast track process happened, and as you know we took a bit of an open church approach. We knew there were a few schools who were looking at doing a few things. And we thought maybe there'd be a bike thing. So our approach was, Hey, we don't really know how fast Track works, but we're gonna be paying for the consultant. So everyone put some ideas in there and then we'll see what happens and kind of work things out afterwards - 'cause it was on a quite a short timeframe. And then of course, the confusion that happened, and I understand it, people thought we endorse everything, but we just really hadn't - we'd just put our ideas up together.

Even the 800 homes took us a bit by surprise, but it's water under the bridge. The positive upside of it has actually been a catalyst, a really good discussion around creating a long term plan for the area. And Jana Davis from Te Tapu o Tāne has been instrumental in working with the local community on that plan.

So we're able now to take stock of the work they've been doing and make sure we're getting a really good buy-in through all the stakeholders of anything that happens in the future.

“We are looking at our relationship with Soho and QE2 (land custodians) that may include a revenue share to provide sustainable funding. But with some of the other projects we've been doing looking at Queenstown infrastructure we've come to the conclusion that it would be difficult to do a gondola on its own unless it was part of an integrated transport network around Queenstown.

So my focus for the last few months working with Ross Copland who used to be the CEO of the Zealand infrastructure Commission and we've been looking at how do we solve the broader Queenstown traffic problems.

The new gondola would need to be part of that integrated system. So we've been working with the Otago Regional Council on the question of buses and looking at other technology alternatives as well for solving our public transport issues.

Crux: So if you get this right, you're virtually inventing and building a whole new community from scratch. But if it gets bogged down in the weeds, it just becomes, you know, a bit of a mess? You’re hoping for the best and that it all has a good ending?

RD: “Well, no, we're not, we're not hoping for the best. We're actively leaning into these issues. So one of the things we've been doing is working on a regional deal. So identifying the bits of infrastructure that need to be fixed in Queenstown.

And then collaborating with central and local government, especially around more planning. There's a, there's a model called PAT (Population Affluence Technology) which is how you scale communities - as population grows using technology. So you can't use the old technology and keep the same lifestyle, which we see with our local transport at the moment. I mean, if you think about it, we've actually gone back in a major way with transport now. You can't freely drive around the basin now at many key times of the day.

It's actually painful now. So we've lost our quality of life because of lack of planning. So I think we're at a point where those of us who are already motivated to make Queenstown amazing and have a strategy are now leaning into solving these problems.