John MacDonald: Yes to more tourists. But...

There’s nothing wrong with backing yourself but, as a country, we have some pretty high and mighty ideas sometimes.   

A good example is the previous Labour government’s approach that, when it comes to tourism, we should only try to get the people with truckloads of money to come here for a holiday. What they called the “higher value tourists”.  

And I’m delighted that the Government is saying we need to get over ourselves and pretty much anyone and everyone who wants to visit from overseas is going to be welcome to come here.  

Nicola Willis, the new economic growth minister, is making the very good point that it was all very well for the previous government to think that getting the people with big money over here was the better bet. But that was no guarantee of big spending.  

She’s saying today: “I want all tourists. Because, ultimately, it’s not the government that decides how much a tourist spends when they come to New Zealand. The tourist will make that decision.”  

She says: “Our job is to make it easy for them to come in the door, easy for them to come to New Zealand. Then, when they get here, I’ve got great faith in our tourism providers that they’ll do everything they can to get as many dollars out of those back pockets as possible.”  

No arguments from me there. Because we are not Venice, we are not overrun with tourists. In fact, I would say that we’ve never been overrun with tourists, not even before Covid.  

Tell that to the bloke in Queenstown though who got into an argument with a mate of mine in a burger bar there one night.  

We were there with a whole bunch of people and this guy was telling us how much of a pain in the backside it was to have all us out-of-towners there.    

“Loopies” he called us. I remember, back in the day, the locals in Wanaka used to talk about all the “loopies” coming to visit for a holiday, as well.  

But, as my mate politely pointed out to this guy in the burger bar - no tourists, no visitors, no Queenstown. Even our lot. Who were there on the smell of an oily rag.  

Another thing too is that, if we’re totally honest with ourselves, we’re not actually that special compared to all the other countries that international tourists have the option of visiting.  

Yes, New Zealand is beautiful. And when you go to places like Glenorchy, near Queenstown, for example —which I did a few weeks back, and which is a stunning part of the country— it reminds you what a special place this is.  

But there are lots of other special and beautiful places in the world too.  

Which is why I think it’s great that the Government plans to get us off this high horse that the last government put us on when it comes to the type of people we want to try and get over here for a holiday.  

Why I think it’s great that the new thinking, is that anyone who wants to come here is welcome.    

But. And there’s always a but – actually, there are a couple of buts.  

One of them, is that tourism is not a silver bullet on its own. Because, generally, tourism jobs don’t pay all that well.   

The other but —and this is the more significant one— is that if this is the approach the Government’s going to take, it has to do more than what Nicola Willis is talking about.  

Because it’s all very well to say that it’s the Government’s job to get the tourists here and it’s the tourism operators’ job to get as much money as possible out of them once they’re here.  

But, as people in places like Franz Josef know, more visitors means more demand for basic services like public toilets and all that stuff – a demand that local councils just can’t afford to meet.  

And this is where the Government is going to have to have more skin in the game if it really wants this open-door policy to reap the economic benefits that it wants.  

So yes, ditch the pipedream that New Zealand is only a place for wealthy tourists and sell us to the world and get as many visitors here as you can.  

But don’t leave it to locals and their struggling councils to provide all the basic services and facilities that these visitors are going to need once they get here. 

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