National and Labour Limit Response to Kāpiti Airport Closure Threat to Lobbying, Rule Out Direct Intervention

National and Labour both want Kāpiti Coast Airport at Paraparaumu to stay open, but neither has gone beyond advocacy, and neither has backed direct government action to prevent its closure. The future of the privately owned airport became an election issue late in the campaign for the contested Kāpiti electorate, after it emerged that its property developer owner, NZ PropCo, was reaching an agreement with a potential buyer. The owner is "engaging" with Land Information New Zealand (LINZ) under section 40 of the Public Works Act, which requires land no longer needed for public works to be offered back.

National MP Tim Costley said at a recent election debate hosted by the local chamber of commerce that there were two offers for the airport. One comes from Hāpai Property, a conglomerate of mostly out-of-Wellington iwi that wants to turn the land into housing on condition that the airport is closed before the sale. That would require the Kāpiti Coast District Council to change the district plan and rezone the land from its current "Airport Zone". A public meeting on the airport's future is being held on Thursday.

Costley and Labour candidate Sophie Handford both said the airport should stay open. Costley called for lobbying to keep the land zoned as an Airport Zone but ruled out the Government buying the airport, which LifeFlight uses frequently when Wellington Airport is closed for maintenance or in bad weather. Handford said the council, residents and mana whenua should form a long-term plan for the airport, and that the Government should have given it more protection through the Emergency Management Act, which lists 21 airports nationwide as essential but not Kāpiti.

The parties' emergency management spokespeople, Labour's Cushla Tangaere-Manuel and National's Mark Mitchell, did not answer questions from Local Democracy Reporting on whether they would commit to buying the airport. Tangaere-Manuel said the airport's future should not be left solely to commercial interests, while Mitchell referred questions to Costley.

Sounds Air is the only airline with scheduled flights from the Kāpiti Coast to Nelson and Blenheim, after Air Chathams suspended its Auckland service in late July. Kāpiti Coast mayor Janet Holborow said in May that the council could not afford to buy the airport but would use any available means to keep it viable and attractive to future owners.

Small regional airfields in private hands sit in an awkward position: they can carry medical flights, diversions and the only scheduled links for a district, yet their land is valued by the owner against alternative uses such as housing. Where an airfield is not named on a national list of essential airports, its continued operation depends on local zoning and on whoever owns the land, not on any duty to keep runways open. Here, the zoning is the lever that both major parties point to, and it sits with the district council, which has said it cannot afford to buy the site.

The case also shows how resilience arguments and commercial sale terms pull in different directions. LifeFlight's use of the airport when Wellington Airport is shut is a service benefit that does not appear in a property buyer's calculation, and a purchase conditioned on closure removes that capacity regardless of how often it is needed. With Sounds Air the only scheduled operator on the Nelson and Blenheim routes, a closure would also end the remaining scheduled service from the Kāpiti Coast.

The next markers are the public meeting on Thursday, the outcome of the owner's engagement with LINZ under section 40 of the Public Works Act, and whether the council is asked to rezone the land from Airport Zone. A change to the district plan is the step that would make a closure-conditioned sale workable, so that decision carries more weight than the parties' statements of support.