Arriving on a jet plane

Otago Daily Times

5 hours ago

Of the dozen or more planes which landed at Dunedin Airport on Tuesday, one Jetstar flight was just that little bit more special than the other arrivals.
When the Airbuses' wheels hit the Momona tarmac at 2.30pm, Dunedin Airport was once again Dunedin International Airport, as the first of three scheduled weekly flights between here and the Gold Coast reconnected the southern city with Australia, and the world.
To say that the flight had been eagerly awaited would be a major understatement.
Southern tourism operators, already slammed by the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic, have been desperate for an international flight of some description to resume on a route to Dunedin.
While tens of thousands of cruise ship passengers make for a busy spring and summer, operators do bring tours to Dunedin in autumn and winter, and some visitors to southern skifields do roam further afield, there is no substitute for a potential 20,000-plus visitors a year landing at your doorstep.
Quite apart from the potential tourism spend benefits of the new route for Dunedin, for families who have loved ones on either side of the Tasman, reuniting for important life milestones will now be just that little bit easier.
Both they and the business community will welcome not having to book three or four connecting flights to get themselves from Dunedin to points further afield, or having to make a time-consuming drive to Queenstown or Christchurch to fly directly out of the country.
The subject of international flights has been an important one for Otago Daily Times readers — it is a regular topic of letters to the editor, and even more so after local teen Benjamin Paterson launched his lobbying campaign for Dunedin to be put back on flight schedules.
This was, of course, something which many people in the city had been working on for many months, although the added impetus of the publicity Benjamin gained did those working in the background no harm whatsoever.
Many people, from the airport to the council to local politicians to Benjamin Patterson, can claim a moment in the sunshine which that first plane was bathed in when it landed in Dunedin on Tuesday.
But in many ways the hard work starts now. As many of our aforementioned readers have noted in their letters, Jetstar is a business, not a charity, and unless people use this new route it will be closed. The expense, let alone the carbon footprint, of transtasman flights will be unjustifiable if the Airbus is full of empty seats.
Dunedin's tourism operators already enthusiastically spruik the city and region's virtues to potential overseas visitors. Those efforts, not just in the Australian market but further afield, will now need to be redoubled so as to ensure a steady stream of sightseers to the city.
Conference organisers should also be encouraged to put Dunedin back on their schedules, now that it is potentially easier for overseas attendees to make their way South.
Inevitably, some have questioned whether Coolangatta is really the prime destination in Australia which southerners wish to travel to.
But quite apart from the fact that there is plenty to recommend about its Gold Coast location, Coolangatta is an hour by road from Brisbane and its airport has regular connecting flights to all state capitals, as well as Indonesia, Canada and the United States.
That does indeed make Dunedin closer to the world. The welcome mat was well and truly out on Tuesday, and hopefully it will remain so. Takutai Tarsh Kemp
The death of Te Pati Māori MP Takutai Tarsh Kemp yesterday was the second time this Parliamentary term that the House has had to adjourn business as MPs mourn one of their own.
She was not a prolific contributor in the debating chamber, but the kidney complaint which she quietly managed and which claimed her at the cruelly young age of 50 offers an explanation for that.
It is also a reminder, as was the death of Green list MP Fa'anānā Efeso Collins last year, that there is an inequality in life expectancy statistics in New Zealand.
Ms Kemp was a campaigner for Māori deprivation to be recognised and addressed, and that will be her political legacy.