The media chasing this misidentified British family into traffic in Hamilton today is peak cray.
How petty are we as a people in the slow news summer?
I mean if we are going to be even handed, wouldn’t we be far more outraged by Kiwis illegally dumping rubbish than some jumped up yobbos from England?
The surprise by how popular this story of schadenfreude has been however does speak to a deeper anger at open door tourism.
Right now we have just under 5 million residents living in NZ.
Last year we allowed in 129 000 migrants.
On top of that we have 150 000 international students and workers with temporary work visas who have been obscenely exploited by a de-unionised job market and additional to that, we have almost 4 million tourists visiting us each year.
No one is talking about the impact of tourism on our country.
The intense and widespread anger this touring family from Britain has tapped into hints at something far larger.
How can a country built for 5 million cope with an additional 4 million? Our infrastructure is groaning already, how is it supposed to also deal with 4million more using it for free?
The tourism tax that has just been brought into place was decried by the industry as turning visitors off, well if it stops tourists like these British ones, isn’t that a good thing? In fact shouldn’t we be pricing being a tourist here much higher if this is the sort of tourists who can get in?
Why should an industry that takes and takes and takes and seems to give so little back be allowed a free ride for so long? If the planet is running out of pristine places, then what we have should be set at a premium price.
How sustainable is the tourism industry?
Freeloader camping is a major and growing issue. If you give something away for free, then you can expect it to be over used and abused
+1
Great post. Greater tourists taxes are needed, we now seem to have as many tourists here as residents and the tourists all use the roads, health system, and going to the toilet and showering contributing to waster water and sewerage costs which by and large the residents are paying the infrastructure, clean up costs, emergency rescues and pollution costs for!
There should be a decent entry/activity fee on entering NZ which is shared amongst the government departments above.
And also permanent residents and citizens travelling internationally should be paying it too, as if you can afford to come and go (and often don’t even pay the same taxes in NZ as workers) they should pay more!
The simplest taxes should be transaction/Robin Hood taxes in my view so that NZ leads the way to a global tax and if you choose to live or come to NZ, you pay for that privilege and people will whinge and moan but the 2% charges don’t seem to stop people using credit cards so as soon as people got used to a tax on money and transactions here then it will get rid of the financial tightwad tax evading scum bags (hopefully) and we get honest people coming here.
We can also out the use of small vans converted to campers, that have no onboard toilets or showers. I also heard tourists leasing campers with onboard facilities are charged a surcharge if they actually USE their onboard toilets. They practice must cease forthwith!!
Common misconception, you get charged if it’s returned dirty, ie: not clean after use as is usual with all rental vehicles.
I have a certified self contained van that’s my second home and stay in a lot of freedom camp parks in the upper north island. Judging from the rubbish I’ve seen laying around most is dropped by locals. All the foreign tourists I’ve met on the road are very careful when it comes to disposing of rubbish, sure they are holidaying on the cheap but generally they take care not to leave crap behind. Unlike the local dudes who drop their box of empties after a few brews at the beach and take exception to me pointing out they should dispose at the local refuse centre.
I would have thought our major problem is that for thirty years we have mainly catered to a tourist that did everything on the cheap. The growth has been in cheap dodgy accommodation – including air b&b and freedom camping. Why are we surprised we get tourists who do not respect our country, we are no different from any other third world country that people from first world can come, get trashed and leave. When someone from the first world gets killed in our country we grovel the way Morocco did and have candle lit marches to keep the tourists coming. The surprise isn’t that tourists behave badly here it’s that the country is surprised.
@Lucy, according to this site, the main tourists in NZ are OZ, Chinese and US visitors… not sure how many are in the dodgy accommodation market, personally wondering if the many freedom campers are actually poor international students, homeless kiwis and migrants and illegal immigrants that apparently are rampant in Hawkes Bay.
https://www.tourismnewzealand.com/markets-stats/
Since NZ seems incapable of keeping detailed statistics on anything, let alone analysing them correctly it is hard to know what is going on.
A lot of tourists are in NZ may be under that visa but are not tourists but essentially living here while visiting relatives, waiting for permanent visas, buying housing etc
All the tourists need to use roads, hospitals and infrastructure like sewerage and waste water so clearly it is not fair that increasingly Kiwis are becoming working poor in their own countries as they bear the burden of so many people in NZ who don’t work but use the countries facilities and the profits going to private individuals like multinational hotel chains and airlines and cleaning up after yobbos or visitors who are not actually here for tourism at all but to try to get residency or commit scams like importing in drugs or theft gangs.
Deep fried from a box? That’s all we do in New Zealand. When traveling to New Zealand ask yourself, what do you do that is uniquely New Zealand that we do better. What are the things that we do really better than the rest of the world? We have great Brazilian restaurants, Japanese restaurants, French restaurants. European style and Asian style restaurants. But you’re in Auckland for two or three days, who’s going to even want to do that. Are we catering for us, or are we catering for tourists…,
What do we have that the rest of the world definitely doesn’t have. Well we have healthy seas for one, ask any one who’ve traveled to another city and there harbours are disgusting and New Zealand’s fisheries management systems is one of the best. So we have better sea food than you. So you can go to any fish & chips shop. Maybe it’s not the best fish & chips in the world but kiwi fish & chips is a unique working class universal experience. I’d do that.
Yeah I’d do adventure tourism and hiking, if I was looking for the best walks in the world I’d be going to the South Island, or at least dumping a huge amount of money of public toilets and other transport and hotelier infrastructure that can handle an extra million or two tourists.
CO2 tax on all plane fares now.
I’m quite proud on New Zealand’s response to these feral ‘pikeys’ from the UK.
Someone had the wit to set up a FB page to report sightings of them and they were successfully hounded by a citizen army where law enforcement was clearly lacking.
Well done NZ!
What are you talking about? Law enforcement spent hours on them.
Vigilanteeism is fine, Andrew until someone sets up a FB page to harass YOU for being a rightwing ass. Then you’d buck up your ideas a bit, eh?
“How sustainable is the tourism industry?”
It’s not. But when are we going to take a look in the mirror and realise that locals are pricks too?
Even if the locals are pricks, who in their right mind wants more pricks!
Some years ago, one if my rellies was caught after he’d dumped household and vehicle parts rubbish in a bush area. He was caught and fined. I told him he deserved everything he got.
It’s interesting how the local Council caught him. Well done that local Council.
Meanwhile, before the break, yer average good ol’ kiwi person proved to be totally incapable of using recycle facilities without leaving a stinking mess behind…
Couldn’t be bothered to pay tip fees so all sorts of yuck was dumped for someone else to clear.
If they couldn’t be arsed to do that then a quick hiff over a bank into a gully and a creek and ‘she’ll be right, mate.’
This is The True Kiwi Way and has been for years and years.
(Doubt? Look at the middens in the gold rush towns. The treasure troves of old tv’s stashed under State houses, and the nastiness around some blocks of flats. The trashing of wheelie bins.)
“Pissing in the soup…” Even the ‘nicest’ people do it.
What is everyone raving about!! its all just part and parcel of John Key’s “Brighter Future”…….isn’t it?
John Key loves tourists, the more the merrier to keep the taxes going on corporate welfare for housing, conventions centres, roads, air lines with big carbon emissions and stadiums (don’t worry about the pollution that goes into the sea or waste shipped to even more third world countries).
So long as Air New Zealand gets bums on seats all is good!
Yep. Uptight pakeha getting pissy about their tauiwi cousins, aue!
What exactly have these people done? Left a bit of rubbish on a beach, which they claim they did because they were being harassed and told to go back to where they came from – a standard racist taunt. Tried to evade paying for a meal by a bit of trickery once they saw how expensive it was. Shop lifted a couple of energy drinks. Were a bit rowdy.
For this they have been pursued and hounded wherever they have gone, in a country where illegal rubbish dumping is commonplace, where dairy and liquor shop proprietors fear for their lives, and much else is far more worthy of hand-wringing attention. As I see it, these people are being hounded because middle class New Zealand can’t stand seeing working class people with enough money to go on holiday, and the confidence to answer back. Diversity is wonderful, so long as it’s middle class diversity.
Glad you said ‘hounded’ Olwyn – we’ll probably blaming them for chewing gum on the streets of Singapore next. Kid showed a bit of pluck showing the finger to Kiwi rabble – neither of mine would have dared at that age.
In the well-appointed well-regulated camping grounds of Europe, some families may spend their summer. That’s all they can afford for a holiday.
Steeped in beauty and history it all works well until the idiot Tiki Tour loads of crude boozy Australians and NZ’ers turn up and behave with total disregard for fellow campers.
Lake Lugano where the marble ablution blocks are better than many of us have in our homes, I admonished a Kiwi pissing on the ground outside his tent at 2am one morning saying he was the sort of person who gave all of us a bad name. He hadn’t a clue what I was talking about. I was awake because their drunken rowdiness kept me awake.
Had to give hospitality in London to a Dunedin speech therapist. She told how about 20 of them rented a 3 bedroom house in quiet leafy Wimbledon, saying, “We’ve certainly livened up that street.”
New Zealanders have behaved quite abominably this week.
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