Mike's Minute: Why not charge tourists to visit our hot spots?

I have at least partially changed my mind on charging tourists. 

The idea that you can wander around our conservation estate for free is, of course, nuts. 

Like the various charges that we have placed on tourists, whether it be at the border, or potentially in a hotel with a bed tax, the simple truth is if we got our act together in terms of marketing and seat capacity to the country, people would be happy to pay them. 

Why? Because everyone pays for everything all over the world and if post-Covid travel has taught us anything, it's that you can basically rob a tourist blind and they are still happy to pay. 

That’s before you get to the bit where our dollar is so pathetic that most people coming here can't believe what they get on the exchange rate. 

But as part of the conservation announcement over last weekend what we also got was New Zealand's other great problem – the negative reaction. 

As much as we love our open spaces and clean air and national parks you have never seen a group of people more determined not to have anyone touch them. 

God forbid we should open the place up to a bit more business. We have seen it for years in the RMA and groups like Forest & Bird, who must have spent millions on lawyers in the environment court looking not to change anything. 

The Quiet Sky group at Waiheke and various other locations are determined never to see a chopper polluting their environment ever again. 

There is this default position whereby we are happy to be left alone, we don’t like interlopers, intruders or *ick* tourists. And we certainly don't want them tramping over our stuff, far less *ick* landing a helicopter and then tramping over our stuff. 

We don't like cruise ships either so we have made them ruinously expensive to park here. So, they don’t. 

Yay, a win for the greenies. 

What we do like though is lots more pay, lots more hospital beds, much better education, lots of welfare and generous dollops of free stuff, all paid for by the money tree in Wellington. 

The fact tourism, the conservation estate, ships and rich Americans in E130's pay for a lot of it doesn’t seem to have registered. 

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