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Friday, 5 March 2004
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Paving paradise
The Caples Valley is under threat from a gondola project planned to provide easy tourist access to Milford Sound. Skyline Enterprises and Ngai Tahu are planning to apply for resource consent for the project.
The gondola would run from the Greenstone River mouth on the western shore of Wakatipu, up the Caples Valley, over the McKellar Saddle, across the head of the Greenstone and down to the Milford Road somewhere near the Divide (the Fiordland end of the Routeburn Track).
The lower Caples Valley is not pristine wilderness. Cattle graze the grassy valley floor, and deer browse the regenerating forest undergrowth. Nevertheless it is a valuable natural area, popular with trampers, hunters, and fly fishers. It was the first place that I ever saw the endangered Yellowhead. The only other place I've ever seen it is in the neighbouring Greenstone Valley.
To me, the logic of degrading the natural landscape in the name of tourism is both morally bankrupt and economically misguided. People can already get to Milford Sound. The drive is long, but what's the hurry? Most tourists take the bus and consider the bus journey a major part of the experience. It is without a doubt the grandest, most beautiful road in the country. This gondola would bypass Te Anau entirely. Understandably, Te Anau tourism operators are unhappy about that. We simply can't keep destroying our natural treasures in the name of making them more convenient for lazy, impatient tourists. And of course not all tourists are lazy and impatient. When I walked the Caples, I met other New Zealanders, but also Israelis, Germans, Japanese. These are people who came here to New Zealand to experience our wilderness places. Before we fuck it up, that is.
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Sorry, what?
An article on Stuff talks about MPs over 65 years of age drawing a pension.
New Zealand First MP Jim Peters, also 66, said he had earned the pension. "As a high-paying taxpayer, I've not had the benefit of even a one dollar tax exemption. "If I'd been a self-employed person who enjoyed all the generous taxation incentives (which go with that), I would not have taken the benefit."
What is he talking about? I've been self-employed (and on a part time basis I still am). Self-employed people don't have it easy at all. They have no employees, so no surplus value for them; they have high compliance costs — the paperwork doesn't get much easier just because they are a small business; they get laughed at by banks and financial institutions; they have to spend a lot of time doing things they don't like or are no good at: answering the phone, marketing, accounting; and finally they are often offering a new product the market doesn't know about or care about. . . . Mr Peters, conversely, has a salary of $146000. That must be rough. Poor rich man.
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