Queenstown’s reputation at risk after revelations of workers living in cars
Queenstown is the jewel in our tourism crown but revelations some out-of-town workers are living in their cars is putting its reputation at risk.
Every. Single. Year. it’s the same bloody story.
Queenstown is so expensive and elite that it can’t house the workers those elite require and that even in Queenstown, the entire town is reliant on the low wage economy!
If Queenstown – rich, snobby, elite Queenstown can’t build houses for their crucial workforce, doesn’t that highlight how warped the market has become?
If Queenstown – rich, snobby, elite Queenstown is reliant on the low wage economy, doesn’t it highlight the addiction throughout the country?
If Queenstown – rich, snobby, elite Queenstown is endlessly trapped in this cycle, what hope for the rest of the country?
Queenstown has become a symbol of just how weak our social infrastructure reliant on free market myths has become.
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Martyn – So if it is every year, why is the Government, either Labour or National, fast tracking housing developments???
Because their corporate political donors include real estate developers, who want artificially high real estate prices, based upon deliberately constrained supply and a market bubble blown up huge amounts of printed paper currency (i.e. constant currency devaluations).
Their idea of ‘economic development’ is turning every country that doesn’t have Dickensian sweatshops into a Caribbean island: nothing but overpriced hotels and tin-shack slums!
Kristoff R – Thank you…makes sense, sadly.
FYO.. THE tories certainly did NOT fast track any housing developments that weren’t the result of hundreds/thousands of state tenants being evicted on specious grounds, to say the least… As usual, I find that NZers seem to have lost the intelligence to comprehend anything that involves more than one aspect of any discussion/proposal, or be able to recognize when your favourite “news reader” is actually blowing it out of his/her arse….
I’ve conversed with “diggers” out in the desert hundreds of miles from any town, who had a better grasp of what is going on in their country than anything I have read here, and these weren’t “smart” blokes.. They had common sense.. Something in very short supply in this clusterfuck of a country…
Well it won’t improve after October. In fact when Luxon of Nazareth, and his flagrant vested interest show, comes to town it will get worse. But hey it’s all good, his race baiting sidekick will cancel the gun registry. That will feed people.
The housing market doesn’t work because the supply is deliberately restricted by the planning and consenting authorities.
Who do those local authorities serve? The people who already have a house – and they benefit from not having cheaper/more houses built in their part of the market.
lol yeah bro they’d only be living 15 to a house if the MEAN MEAN councils would just let developers build even worse slums
Maybe we should just have tent cities. Cheap affordable and anyone can pitch one.
Or in cars and caravans in trailer parks – which are the only alternative if people are not allowed to build. But hey, at least no one has made a profit, amiright?
Your ‘slum’ would at least have running water and indoor toilets.
A stark reminder of some of the contradictions involved in capitalism.
Rich fuckers and developers restrict housing supply to ramp up their untaxed capital gains, but…rich fuckers need underlings, and the resulting servers, cooks, trades people and other proles need somewhere to bloody live and hang out…
Yes Tiger mountain. Who is going to clean the toilet s and serve them slop in the morning after a big nite on the razz. Who is going to run the airport and take the trash out.
Queenstown represents nothing but the economics of a place build on the beauty of the land and the desire of the very rich that have properties there to have servants but without having to provide servants housing, and of course our politians that generally can’t give a fuck about providing cheap servants housing as there is no profit to be made and no glory to be had.
Ditto for Auckland, Wellington, Tauranga, Rotorua…………………….
but what should give you a happy is that the people that you so admire in the Queer Party the Labour Party the TPM are all very well housed, fed and watered. And what should make you rejoice even more, you are paying for them to be very well housed, fed and watered my dear. AS does any other tax payer in this country. So clearly, cheap and affordable housing is provided, for those on a 6 figure tax payer funded income.
This is the alternative, living in a cartel style body corporate run by crooks who pay off crooked cops to slam you down for exposing that this is nothing but a fucked up drug cartel. https://www.stuff.co.nz/life-style/homed/housing-affordability/132109647/the-small-village-where-some-pay-hundreds-of-dollars-in-levies-while-others-pay-thousands
What a total shit hole Queenstown has become, the town reminds me of an airport terminal with a nice photo as a backdrop. A typical tacky three ring circus. God knows how people can stand living there amongst the selfie stick waving zombies wandering around, humans have lost the plot.
pretty much all the towns in NZ have become shitholes.
This one is off the wall! Think of everything you could do to head fuck a body corporate then triple it.
Boarded up dairies with fog canons and bolders in front of the shops, ramraids, public misery, closed shops, councils who can’t cope and government who is no where to be seen. Most towns in NZ are in serious decline and dangerous.
Yes, it is sad, but that is the current reality. Individual suburbs might still be nice, but even that illusion is slowly crumbling.
Poverty eventually becomes a festering sore if not attended too, and fwiw, no one is currently attending.
Admitting that we seemingly have lost the plot is the first step to fixing the issues. And one of them is building housing for the servants near their jobs, and bring back safety into the towns so people actually want to go there.
Pretending that we are all right while the body is rotting is one of the issues everything around us seemingly turning to shit.
25+ people living in one house is very Hong Kong – and i would assume that the very rich and the tourists that come for a day or three think Hong Kong an awesome city, in the same sense as people think Queenstown is awesome. https://www.businessinsider.com/crazy-pictures-of-micro-apartments-around-hong-kong-2018-1
“And one of them is building housing for the servants near their jobs” – says it all really
Otorohanga hasn’t become a shit hole. It always was. But at least we’re not Te Kuiti.
Otorohanga hasn’t become a shit hole. It always was one. But at least we aren’t Te Kuiti.
How true. Went there once, on route to the Matukituki valley, and walking the main drag in search of something to eat had a feeling the town was a cardboard cut-out, reeked of impermanence and was simply full of tasteless service industry (which it is of course). Didn’t get into the surrounding suburbs where the rich folk live (or do they actually live there) other than a walk along the lakefront. You can see why folk would want to live somewhere where the vista is spectacular and the air fresh and clean, a mountain resort of our very own, but it occurs to me with none of the history or culture of the resort towns and villages in the European alps. They too make their salt from tourism but there was something about the vibe in Queenstown that was distasteful. I can see why. The premise on which the town was developed and the model on which it operates is fucked, as a good many TDB posts have reiterated.
In the old days before all the development I bet Queenstown was a pretty little village in the mountains. Has Wanaka gone the same way?
always an over rated over priced nothing town full of tragic petty bourgeois kiwis and dickheads.I grew up in Otago descended from pioneer stock ( Scots) grateful for the excellent education I received I could not wait to go and live somewhere WARM. Fuck the snow bro!
Fuck’em. It’s only stupid holidaying whiney backpackers on a working tour. That’s what happens when you open the floodgates for imported workers. So fuck’em.
Ba ha! I kind of agree. However… It’s the ‘whiny backpackers’ who are kind of lovely and friendly. I worked in, around and above Queenstown for a number of years within the film industry as a locations scout and locations manager and I found that tourists were very pleasant and generally kind and obliging. It’s the fucking locals I used to have a problem with, specifically some of the locals within the film industry itself. Their arrogance and their general sense of entitlement was a thing of legend throughout AO/NZ. The Queenstown Mafia, as they came to be known as, is exactly that but without the Class.
No good can come of our gubbimint luring people here to exploit them and that works both ways. For tourists and for the so-called service ‘industry’.
And so yes @ T etc, limiting tourism numbers to here could be a good idea but we might only have to wait fifty to one hundred years to when the effects of male infertility kicks in and there may only be about 20% of the current population left on earth.
You seen ‘Children of Men’?
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0206634/
It freaked me the fuck out.
Indeed…
That’s the spirit!–let the well off make their own coffees, park their own cars, clean their own bathrooms, walk their own companion animals, cook their own kai, do their own shopping, build their own decks, style their own hair and wax their own bits…
Really, for once it is totally ok to say–“tell someone who cares!”…if these people cannot go as far as providing shelter for their underlings.
Too quick to the draw I think. Woofers and the like are not wealthy but are part of the world’s youth getting to know each other and the planet. So balance is needed. Let people in to do something for the country, and make friends and compatriots in other countries – not exactly a One World but cutting down the ambivalence of one race/country to another. But we are being flooded at present because it is a money-grabbing thing and it doesn’t present us in a good way. Another propaganda success of falsity like NZ is 100% Pure.
Nothing changes. I visited a large old homestead in NZ. It was spacious and wonderful. The servants’ quarters were up a narrow stairway and were poky and bleak. Still better than sleeping under a warm hedge.
The Council in Aspen Colorado provide accommodation for the service industry.
Some of it in surround towns.
Some employers also provide accommodation.
queenstowns greed will kill queenstown no better example of cannibal capitalism, how do you run your expensive hotel when the toilet cleaners can’t live there
At least I am pleased to see that Martyn is aware of the South Island.
“The entire town is reliant on the low wage economy “- the entire country of NZ has pegged everything to a low wage economy full of retail, fast food, restaurant workers, labourers, cash and criminal class and aged care (on the backs of lazy immigration of pensioners), all very low waged areas to concentrate our economy on. Then they wonder why NZ is getting poorer and nobody can afford housing, utilities or food and nobody can get into hospital anymore! Maybe if the government stops the immigration subsidies and wise up to the ghost job scams, in the low wage sunset industries and concentrate on higher wage industries and opportunities…. Asia is going into higher wage economy, NZ is going in the opposite direction to a land of takeout and street vendors, with thieves being tackled in the streets, while police don’t turn up and tell them to let the thieves go….
What you’re talking about is breaking away from neoliberalism, which means breaking away from globalism, which means breaking away from the U.S. Alliance… and which would mean a Color Revolution of mercenary “moderate rebels”, sent by Langley and the N.E.D., would be launching a regime change operation to try and stop you!
capital hoarders = parasites. chortle chortle. I might have to build a dungeon for my barista and let them out when I need a latte.. chortle chortle. what cuckolds.
nice place to visit – wouldn’t want to live there.