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6:00 am, July 26th, 2025 - 27 comments
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Today's Posts (updated through the day):
any Queenstown people around? What's the km2 of the Wakatipu Basin?
And the population (not of QLD but the Basin itself). I know that's tricky because of seasonal workers
I'm seeing wildly varying numbers online.
or anyone, who can measure using this GIS system
https://statsnz.maps.arcgis.com/apps/instant/sidebar/index.html
That link is a bit off, I get a page that relates to crops in USA
how weird. It's a statsNZ page and it goes to the US crop page for me now too.
What do you call Wakatipu Basin, whole catchment of Whaktipu wai Maori, or area bounded by Bob's Cove, Nevis Bluff and Wye Creek? I'd go for the latter, and then liveable land or the whole including visible faces that can't be developed, huge differences there.
Good luck on the population. That's been an ongoing issue forever, 'official', as in government, stats are resident, as in long term accomodation on census night and are very light as they exclude people here seasonally and short term visitors. Probably the most accurate measure for population, and other social ills, is sewerage inflows. Again getting reliable numbers is difficult but some numbers are starting to drop out with current Environment Court bingle regarding our sewerage disposal and ultimate development potential. It's almost as if there's a longstanding administrative intent to minimise population the basin to avoid providing services.
One aspect of the population figures that doesn't seem right is that the peak day figure has gone from 80,000 in late 80's to 115,000 now, and population from 5000 to 50,000, and airport arrivals have gone from under 100K to over 2 million / year. Something doesn't seem quite right there, but commuting / business travel with the airport becoming the southern regional airport may explain some of it.
yeah, land that can be built on. I was thinking more Fernhill, Arrowtown, then as far as the start of the gorge and back to the lake and then down to Jacks Point. Wiki said 58km2, but the statsNZ map I played with came out just above 100km2. The Wikipedia piece reckons the population is 1,400, but the whole piece is frankly very odd, so I'm not relying on it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wakatipu_Basin
That 50,000 resident population thing popped up a few times when I was searching, I just assumed when they said Queenstown they meant the whole district including Wanaka etc.
Can't imagine the nightmare it would be trying to manage services like sewerage when your rate base is tiny compare to the number of people using toilets each day. Not that that's an excuse for the current problems.
if you follow footnote 3 on that wiki piece, you will get a page that sends you to the correct StatsNZ page. I used the area measuring tool to get to 100km2
I'd say that Wiki page see's the basin as the rural area north of Kawarau, west of Crown Terrace and south of Coronet, and not including Arrowtown or Arthur's Point. Then the pop figures would be about right. Millbrook is part of Arrowtown. 58 km2 would be about right for that area.
If you're looking for sewerage figures, 90%+ of those people wouldn't be connected to the network, they'd be on septic tank. Lake Hayes is connected, but not much else.
Ok, I'll go with 100km2 then as a ballpark for the wider area.
Looking forward to your post, big issue for the area and whole of the country.
cheers, hoping to get it finished this week.
Sewerage volumes have never been the issue, QLDC has very good data on that but have kept it close. The trouble is Council always looking for the cheapest way of dealing with it. With the current debacle we need to find out whose registration it was conceived and signed off under, and what sort of independent review was applied.
This isn't the first time a sewerage system has failed here, Arrowtown and Arthurs Point had to have urgent rethinks in 90's. Both needed to be piped to Shotover, with waste being trucked in interim, then both pipelines had to be rebuilt because they were grossly undersized.
If there's a case study in taking 3 Waters out of the hands of Local Government it's QLDC
what's your sense of the locals' feeling about 3 waters, before and now?
A lot of people are just a little annoyed with where the town has ended up, Council elections will be interesting. Especially with Darren Riwi making it a leadership issue.
I took the time yesterday to watch this uplifting documentary which restores my faith in humanity despite the current state of the world.
It captures the grassroots tactics and methods used by PA against the arms industry in Britain. The film also showcases the millions of dollars in damage and billions in unfulfilled contracts resulting from such actions.
"A documentary about the activist group Palestine Action"
https://youtu.be/8x11IE9A0qg
https://tokillawarmachine.com
I'll be following the first of those links later (no time right now). Having read York and Majid's statement, I found myself hoping they've got multiple copies of the film placed in safe secret locations.
Political commissars are back.
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The Federal Communications Commission finally approved an $8 billion merger between Paramount and Skydance on Thursday after several changes at CBS that were widely seen as efforts to placate President Donald Trump. Part of the deal will apparently require an ombudsman to check the media company’s supposed political biases. And FCC commissioner Brendan Carr has been doing the rounds to brag about how he’s getting people on TV to be nicer to the MAGA movement.
[…]
“One of the things they’re going to have to do is put in an ombudsman in place for two years,” Carr said. “So basically a bias monitor that will report directly to the President. So that’s something that’s significant that we’re going to see happening as well.”
https://gizmodo.com/fcc-to-appoint-a-babysitter-to-make-sure-cbs-isnt-anti-trump-2000634566
Interesting read by Brian Easton, from the sidebar.
https://www.pundit.co.nz/content/politicos-vs-wonks
”The choice between politicos and wonks is that the politicos are better at attaining and maintaining office, but their policy achievements are aspirational and rarely effective; policy wonks find it harder to get elected but when they are, they have the power to change. The Economist article is about getting the balance right.”
Let’s hope that the next Labour Government has the balance right.
Rounding up the untermensch.
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Shifting homeless individuals into long-term institutional settings for humane treatment through the appropriate use of civil commitment will restore public order. Surrendering our cities and citizens to disorder and fear is neither compassionate to the homeless nor other citizens. My Administration will take a new approach focused on protecting public safety.
[…]
https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/07/ending-crime-and-disorder-on-americas-streets/
Some very sorted Kiwis are running very very scared at the prospect of a one-term sorted-friendly CoC govt. On 9 Nov 2018, the Supreme Court of NZ agreed with a 24 July 2015 Auckland High Court declaration that "the blanket ban on prisoners' voting was inconsistent with section 12(a) of the Bill of Rights. This is that every New Zealand citizen over the age of 18 years has the right to vote in periodic elections of member of the House of Representatives, which elections shall be by equal suffrage."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taylor_v_Attorney-General#Significance
Since it's looking increasingly likely that the CoC can't win the next general election by fair means, they will be resorting to foul, e.g. the anti-democratic abolition of enrolling to vote on election day. What a spineless bunch – bereft of integrity and rotten to the core.
So, expect more dirty politics from the CoC MPs – govt by the sorted, for the sorted.
What, public health services not frickin' good enough for our sorted PM? Careful now RNZ.
I'm of two minds about this. I would love to see politicians brought down a few pegs by being forced to deal with only public health, education etc, especially waiting lists and trying to get a GP appointment. But I also don't want them clogging up the already overloaded and limited resources that the rest of us are crying out for.
Secondly, politicians who end up in our public hospitals -usually by way of something acute- will get preferential treatment whatever their triage status even if the staff don't want to. Who is going to leave the PM or Ministers of the Crown stuck on a trolley in the ED corridor (or, heaven forbid, a waiting room)? A private cubicle will quickly be found and a doctor bought asap. Should admission be required, a bed will be found, and certainly not in a shared room.
Thus, their experiences of the public health system are not going to correspond to the reality and they'll be full of praises for it and wonder what we're all grizzling about.
"Who is going to leave the PM or Ministers of the Crown stuck on a trolley in the ED corridor (or, heaven forbid, a waiting room)? "
I know of two or three stroppy senior ED nurses who would happily do that, so long as triage/priority was appropriate.
I also liked the suggestion that pollies use public transport to and from airports.
Reminds me of the time I was waiting to see an orthopaedic surgeon (privately I'm afraid). The waiting room was busy, and Michael Talley, one of THE Talley brothers, walked up to the receptionist and said something along the lines of "Don't you now who I am, I'm far too important to wait". He was told to sit down and wait his turn with everybody else. We chuckled about it all the way home.
Understand the concern Kay, but 'them' can only be a few hundred, including dependants, compared to a few million of 'the rest of us'.
It’ll never happen, but dreams are free