I don't know about that for Queenstown. There's quite a bit of construction, but the town is beside a lake in a glacial valley, so there's very little land available (it's sandwiched between the lake and very steep hills). There's basically one narrow main road to get to other nearby towns, which have seen a lot of construction due to the demand (and in some cases have sprung into existence).
This argument is tired and simplistic. Zoning and other homebuilding laws also prevent large-scale tragic disasters that occur because of self-interested corner-cutting and profiteering.
Many people died on a regular basis because of the unregulated living spaces you’re fantasizing about.
This is a great study on people actually dying because of these problems, temporally located many decades after the most egregious problems had been prevented:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2965780/
There are similar studies for traffic and pedestrian issues due to poor zoning.
The idea that somehow one builder in competition with other builders with no enforcement is going to make appropriate safety tradeoffs everywhere they need to is untenable.
OP: “Zoning laws mean you can’t just build large volumes of cheap accommodation.”
Building codes prevent cheap housing more than zoning laws. It sure seemed like a marginally-informed rant to me.
I live on a street that attempted to convert grass-roots to a bike greenway. I don’t think I have car brain. Zoning is useful, but imperfect. It sounds like we’d agree to be against nimby residential protections of high-end housing, but that’s not what OP said. I didn’t realize OP’s post was just a dog whistle.
Zoning laws mean you can’t just build large volumes of cheap accommodation.