Walker’s words are worth a commission
- Grant McLachlan
- 11 hours ago
- 3 min read
Hamish Walker spent three and a-half hours in Queenstown traffic and wrote a column about it. The school run — 15 kilometres, there and back — took him over two hours. But buried two-thirds of the way down was the most revealing sentence the Otago Daily Times has published this year. By his own account, he is “selling around two houses every month” to people leaving town because of the traffic.
Read that again. The columnist diagnosing the disease is clipping the ticket at the funeral.
Walker is the former National MP for Clutha-Southland. In July 2020 he confessed to passing the private details of 18 Covid-19 patients to the media. The State Services Commission inquiry by Michael Heron QC found the leak was deliberate, politically motivated, and neither justified nor reasonable. Walker did not stand again.
Politics’ loss was real estate’s gain. By 2022, Sir John Key was fronting a glowing customer testimonial video for Walker’s Queenstown agency. Walker & Co now boasts that he sells more than $100 million of property a year, including one of the highest-priced lifestyle sales in the country at over $40 million.
So when Walker’s Words turns to traffic, the disclosure in his tagline — director-salesman of Walker & Co Realty — is not a footnote. It is the argument.
His case runs like this. Don’t blame growth; growth is Queenstown’s success. The fault lies with infrastructure that hasn’t kept pace. The answer is four-laning, gondolas, a bed tax on visitors and — above all — more homes and enabled supply. Stopping development, he assures us, fixes nothing.
Every plank of that platform is also his business plan. More greenfield subdivision means more listings. More churn means more commissions. Walker earns a clip on the family fleeing the gridlock and another on the buyer replacing them. For a Queenstown agent, congestion is not a market failure. It is turnover.
Notice the two sales pitches running at once. To buyers, Walker markets the Queenstown dream at a premium. To ODT readers, he describes a district where collecting your children swallows half a working day. Both pitches end with his commission. Only one appears in the brochures.
And the infrastructure meant to redeem it all? Look at the delivery record he skates past. NZTA’s Queenstown Package ballooned from $113 million to $250 million — and still won’t fund the double-laning of a 90-metre stretch of highway at Five Mile. National’s shiny new election pledge is $25 million to four-lane roughly a kilometre of SH6. Walker calls one kilometre a big difference.
That is the fudge at the heart of the column. Queenstown’s congestion is not a delivery hiccup. It is arithmetic: decades of consented growth stacked against infrastructure that was pitched to justify each rezoning, then re-costed, deferred and shrunk. The promised benefits never arrive. The subdivisions always do.
Even the projects that get built fill up. A widened road feeding a geographically constrained basin induces the traffic it was meant to cure — which is why the growth lobby always needs the next project, and the next rezoning to pay for it.
Walker’s one revenue idea is the visitor levy. Tax the tourist. As I have argued before, the bed tax blames absent strangers for a problem speculators and the building industry built — and it conveniently touches neither land-bankers, developers, nor real estate commissions. The same coalition of interests is now using fast-track approvals to dump growth on councils that tried to decline it, and the infrastructure bill on ratepayers.
None of this makes Walker a villain. His conflict is disclosed, and salesmen are allowed opinions. But a column that laments a crisis while prescribing more of what feeds it — and books revenue at every stage of the cycle — is not analysis. It is marketing with a word count.
Walker warns Queenstown can no longer afford to play catch-up. He would know: two settlements a month say families are already voting with their moving trucks — and he holds the listing every time.
