Wellington airport plans to flip where the domestic and international departure areas are. Photo / File
Wellington airport plans to flip where the domestic and international departure areas are. Photo / File
A rather depressing thing happened at Dunedin airport on Tuesday.
No. It wasn't the inability to buy a newspaper. The absence of the Otago Daily Times at an airport is a mere footnote to the possible impending absence of TV3's news service, habitually watched in our household for nearly 30years.
Nor was it the renovations. Every airport has those now. We may all be worried about climate change, but flying we are not about to stop doing. Endless airport carpentry is apparently inevitable.
Nor was the failure, at a busy time, of the monopoly Aviation Security Service to press the second x-ray machine into service all that unusual. In Wellington, that's apparently a feature of the service.
No. Upsetting was the appearance, a first for me in a New Zealand airport, of the Fascist Tube.
This is a machine, common internationally, in which everyday, law-abiding passengers must stand with their arms raised, as if under arrest, to be body-scanned. A scrumpled tissue, a parking ticket, even a fart, is made visible by this contraption.
The good old days of keeping your jacket on by throwing all metallic paraphernalia into your bag for the x-ray, are over.
Back in Wellington, an airport where no renovation is occurring, someone had foolishly discarded a newspaper. The front page declared plans for a $1 billion Wellington airport renovation.
Among the passenger benefits during several years of construction: being driven to the plane across the tarmac by a bus.
Meanwhile, one of the early, successful attempts to make Wellington airport a fun place to be has apparently passed its use by date. The future of the quirky, copper-topped international departure zone dubbed 'The Rock' – not even a decade old – is not assured as the airport plans to flip where the domestic and international departure areas are.
On that sort of turnover, those Lord of the Rings eagles suspended from the concourse roof may not outlast the newly revamped food court.
Just before the airport unveiled this capital expenditure plan, Wellington's presumed mayor-elect, Andy Foster, floated the notion that the city should be open to 'asset-recycling' – a phrase used to sugar-coat the idea that one public asset should be sold in favour of investment in another, more pressing public asset.
In this case, the asset for sale would be Wellington City Council's 34 per cent shareholding in Wellington International Airport, which it owns jointly with Infratil, the smart, Wellington-based, NZX-listed infrastructure company that has consistently provided its shareholders with superior returns over many years.
Lord of the Rings eagles suspended from the concourse roof at Wellington airport. Photo / 123RF
Under Infratil's control, WIAL has tried and so far failed to advance the case for a runway extension that would, in theory anyway, allow long-haul flights between Wellington and major Asian and western American destinations.
Based on an optimistic business case about the actual numbers of global citizens requiring point-to-point connections to a city at the bottom of the world with a population of 300,000 on a good day, the plan has run into major regulatory hurdles.
Even assuming a resource consent would ever be granted to extend the runway a third of a kilometre into Cook Strait, and that airlines and the Commerce Commission would agree to the hiked-up fees Wellington airport would demand to help pay for the upgrade, there's still a big safety question.
The Civil Aviation Authority is right now deciding whether to grant an exemption allowing Wellington a shorter runway than international rules say is preferable.
Note: their decision relates to the existing runway, let alone a longer one. No wonder the $1b revamp plan excludes a runway extension. If it were allowed, the capital draw on the city, as one-third shareholder, would be all the greater.
What this all looks like is an attempt to create the constituency for a sale of Wellington airport. Two sales, in fact.
The first: the sale of WCC's stake. The second: Infratil's sale of the remainder, to quit an asset that is fairly mature, requires capital, and no longer fits its investment strategy. The sweetener for anti-privatisation councillors? Perhaps half a billion dollars, which the WCC could achieve for selling its share of the airport.
Whether it's left-of-centre councillors who favour the most expensive local transport options, like light rail, or Foster's roads-and-tunnels folk, the capital city's new councillors all know the city's Let's Get Wellington Moving transport blueprint is stalled while the city baulks at chipping in its share.
Flogging its stake in an airport that's got plans requiring big money and whose biggest plan – the runway extension – is likely to be politically toxic, should make sense to all of them.
