It’s hard not to feel a certain pleasure at the death of New Zealand hyper tourism.
Like dairy intensification, hyper tourism has been a cursed blessing.
With dairy intensification we have the pollution of our environment and the theft of our water all for a sunset industry which will end once synthetic meat and milk are perfected.
Dairy intensification also opens us up to economic servitude to China.
Similarly problematic hyper-tourism brings in as many visitors as we have population. This generates enormous stress on our underfunded infrastructure and the cheapness of air tickets brings a cheap class of tourist who freedom camp shits all over our nation.
With our borders set to remain closed until a vaccine is available, hyper tourism is dead and we should all cheer that death.
The spin that the tourism dollar trickles down to the rest of us seems like a pretty cheap price to pay if it means we all get to have our roads and traffic flow back.
We must also add to the tourism industry the obscene amount of pollution air travel generates. In a rapidly warming planet, these green house gas emissions can not be tolerated, so hyper tourism must die for the planet to survive.
That doesn’t mean we should simply dump tourism as an industry altogether, that would be economic suicide, but we must for once price the bloody experience properly.
If you want to visit a plague free vacation destination then you pay for it.
No more discount flights with the dregs of the holidaying experience landing on our shores to freedom camp crap all over our nation.
If you want to visit plague free NZ, you have to pay for the 14 day mandatory quarantine stay and accept ongoing track trace measures while in New Zealand.
We should be resetting the International Tourism experience infrastructure now so that we have the hotels to house tourists quarantining here for their mandatory 14 days before moving through to their holiday.
We need to move away from hyper tourism to boutique tourism and appropriately price that experience.
What is the price for a plague free holiday? Ask anyone in Paris, New York or London.
New Zealand has always underpriced what we provide for the world and that mentality brings little value, instead NZ should look to be a properly priced exclusive venue to holiday in.
Now not all tourism operators will be able to service this exclusive clientele and so for them, they need to rapidly reduce their current price gouging tourist prices and instead target domestic tourism and cater for that appropriately because Kiwi boomers won’t be holidaying in Thailand anymore, they’ll be visiting NZ destinations.
This will generate revenue while reducing overall air traffic while reducing the stress on our infrastructure.
It is no longer the tyranny of distance, that distance is our strength and selling point now.
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Scary headlines from a government that needs a serious intervention from the left not the constant adoration.
New Zealand will miss climate deadline by more than a year
https://www.stuff.co.nz/environment/climate-news/121423596/new-zealand-will-miss-climate-deadline-by-more-than-a-year
“Under the Paris accord, every five years countries have to tell the United Nations how much they will do to help keep the world inside 1.5C-2 degrees Celsius of fossil-fuelled heating.
The current round of pledges is not enough to keep the globe inside that comparatively safe temperature zone. 2019 was the second hottest year on record, according to the World Meteorological Organisation.
Countries have the option of updating their self-imposed targets – called Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) – at any time. But, once lodged, NDCs can only go higher. Countries can’t opt to reduce their pledges.”
Instead we are getting this..
Government suspends financial oversight
https://www.stuff.co.nz/national/300004126/government-suspends-financial-oversight
“Some of the most expensive decisions ever made by a New Zealand government will receive no scrutiny from its economic watchdog after Cabinet suspended Regulatory Impact Analysis (RIA), due to Covid-19.”
“This was laid bare last week when Parliament passed the wrong tax law by accident, bringing into force a multi-billion dollar loan scheme without so much as a select committee to scrutinise it. ”
“The Government had intended to pass a different tax law, but a mix up at the Parliamentary Counsel Office (PCO) meant a different tax law was tabled and passed through all stages under urgency before the mix up was noticed by financial website interest.co.nz. An urgent Cabinet meeting had to be held to retrospectively approve the bill.”
And this,
Coronavirus: David Parker tells councils to keep consenting during Covid-19 crisis
https://www.stuff.co.nz/national/121102312/coronavirus-david-parker-tells-councils-to-keep-consenting-during-covid19-crisis
“Environment Minister David Parker has urged mayors and councils to clear a backlog of development consents during the lockdown to pave the way for New Zealand to build its way to economic recovery.
He also said councils should exercise “their discretion wisely” to allow essential businesses to keep running, even if they’re technically breaking the rules of their consent.
This would mean allowing some essential businesses like supermarkets to keep operating outside of the hours that their consents allow.”
Well spotted saveNZ.
It all goes to show that despite bursts of brilliance in public relations by Jacinda, incompetence, negligence, and counter-productive strategies -especially with respect to the long term- remain the norm in both central government local government.
One of the problems of freedom camping tourists is that they obscure the numbers of Aotearoan homeless. One person sleeping in their car (and bathing in toilet sinks) looks much like any other.
However, given the decades of Kiwi OEers who spent their time abroad shitting over the rest of the world, it’s a bit rich to protest too much when that is reciprocated. Personally, I prefer (most) backpackers to tour groups. At least cruise liners look dead in the water!
(yes – that phrasing was in bad taste; originally unintentionally, but not deleted after, so yeah…)
As a Swiss Army pocket farmer, i.e. Of posessing many skills to farm in a diverse, sustainable and as organic a way as possible saw the scam that is dairying coming 1.6 km away.
We, as peoples of this country, didn’t profit from chemically, plasti-farming type A cows. We never enjoyed cheaper cheeses, milks and ice creams did we? $7 for 500 gms of butter ! ? C’mon ?
Many starving, hungry wee AO/NZ kids and $7.00 @ 500 gm butter? Are you fucking kidding me?
As the main four Australian owned banksters suck out $6 billion in net profits each year from us at 20% higher profits than our Australian primary industry competitors…Oh! That’s just fucking great then isn’t it? Aye ?
( Om fuckin’ shanti, shanti, shanti…)
And we had to be just fucking awesome at having our AO/NZ crawling with happy snapsters snapping happily away like brain dead tele tubbies after drinking petrol! Well, that worked out well for us didn’t it? Like piles of human shit at what were once OUR picnic spots ! Of arrogant, moronic loons under man buns doing their social duty by going as slow as possible where it was impossible to pass then speeding up when the roads straightened out. Awesome !? Right?
And all for what? Ever increasing levels of homelessness and child poverty? Sky rocketing meth addiction rates, malnourishment in our children, unaffordable housing etc etc…
Oh yeah! Is terrible to see tourism die a well deserved death NOT! And as far as I’m concerned they can stay the fuck away until they become travelers and fit in with us when they come here. Until then? Fuck off!
“Queenstown’s Dying.” No, it isn’t. It’s just no longer stuffed with clumping mopes in wanky mountain climbing gear just because they can see a frankly average mountain from their rorting hotel room window.
I want to see Queenstown return to as I remember it. A dairy, a pub and a few shops.
You been to Queenstown recently? It’s a ghastly fucking nightmare of a place. The town itself is an ugly little shit of a thing that’s grown from greed. It’s tilt slab and faux shist with a myriad of mountain gear shops selling Chinese junk to schmucks. People cue for hours to get a popular local burger…? Why..? The burgers are like a bucket of vegetable peelings stuffed between two slabs of bread. Queenstown is entirely bullshit.
Frankton, right? Used to be a quaint little place and where the airport is. Now? It’s a tumor stuffed with the likes of The Warehouse and the usual Supermarkup criminals you’ll find rummaging around in your pockets. There’s Mitre10 and a soon to be Bunnings and all crudely screwed down to what were once grass lands under the gaze of The Remarkables.
My old Pop said many years ago as he began to bare witness to the younger swindler about the town of an evening that one day farming will be crushed under the weight of debt and it’ll be the strong arm of our very own IRD that’ll enable foreign bankers and money lenders to gain control of our agricultural export industry.( AKA our primary industry.)
I remember him being asked in an NZBC radio interview what he thought might be a tactic for avoiding such a thing and he said ” Pay New Zealanders not directly involved in farming a proper wage to stay at home. ” he went on ” The state can pay for public transportation, health and an education. Give people good housing or encourage them to build their own homes. We have plenty of materials, all we need are the skills. That way, we can farm properly and export what we don’t need and we’ll become one of the richest countries in the world per head of pop.”
Well, we’ll never know if my fathers predictions and hopes and visions would have come to fruition but we can see the effects of the polarised opposite to his dreams as we look at the news.
Homelessness, poverty, poor mental and physical health, specifically for the working class and an essential [Agrarian primary industry funded ] infrastructure that’s now so expensive only the very rich never have to worry about using it or it simply no longer exists after [the other] very rich sold our stuff and things off to foreign investors at the behest of the same politicians we paid very, very well to take best care of us.
Covid-19 won’t be the last virus to bring life to a standstill and add to that the spectere of the financial cluster fuck brought on us by the greed of the classless,capitalist, riche elite and climate heating which is so terrible and frightening that I dare not think about it and what do you get?
While there is life, it must eat, and AO/NZ grows and exports foods and there’s only five million of us. On a rich and beautiful country who’s closest neighbour is 2000 km away over a heaving ocean.
I don’t know what more I can write to highlight what seems to be invisible to most. It’s like most of you stare at meat and vegetable’s and ask ” So, where’s the food at then?” Most of you remind me of fundementilist christians. Isn’t it they who believe that the Earth is only seven thousand years old and that dinosaur bones were put here by the devil to confuse the God narrative? Or those who cued up to buy ‘fast food’. I mean… really? That’s the best we can come up with? Junk food? Maybe we’re just really fucking dumb?
+100 countryboy well said!…and Mike the Lefty same goes for Cromwell as Glenorchy….there is a ghastly place called the Falcons Nest on its outskirts that looks like it is there built to house China’s army…an institutional jail of a nightmare…WE ABSOLUTELY DO NOT NEED THIS INVASION OF FOREIGN ABOMINATION TOURISM
Nicely put, countryboy.
Just for the record, fundamentalist Christians believe the Earth is 6,000 years old (worked out by adding all the begats in Genesis), and that all the fossils we find -that provide a coherent explanation of the history of life on Earth and a scientific basis for evolution- were put there by God to test our faith.
Your description of Queenstown (I’ve never been there because I really wanted to) mirrors what I have seen of places like Tauranga, Mt. Maunganui, Rotorua, Hamilton, Northshore etc. Tacky, low-cost, tin-box-type buildings erected as quickly as possible so consumers can be relieved of their discretionary spending dollars as quickly as possible on the purchase of [generally Chinese-made] junk. Or fossil-fuel-consuming, planet-fucking devices made in China or elsewhere. Or junk food served in one-use packaging that becomes an immediate problem to dispose of.
Sadly, most people are ‘really fucking dumb’. They have been carefully trained to be that way by the ‘education system’ and by the corporate media.
Oops. I meant to write:
Your description of Queenstown (I’ve never been there because I never really wanted to)
No Countryboy, we’re not dumb, we’re just assumed to be dumb by the shysters of all ilk who wriggle their way into power. Yep, they’ve done good PR with the coronavirus, with a presentable personable looking bloke and blokess with the top job titles, but the desecration of the country has to stop.
Everyone I know not just accepts that tourism should be curbed, but want it curbed.
But already, Ngai Tahu have approached the minister re support for a tourism venture. I couldn’t believe it. Kelvin Davis should have told them that if they want an income, to get their ploughs, till their land,and plant it out. Or is that too much like hard work ? I blame John Key for all this, but it’s time for government to be unequivocal about not prostituting New Zealand, and encourage garnering income in a more productive way, or even settling for a small village economy.
Those who blame Kiwis for having dirty habits are right to do so – they, and Australians are notorious in the
civilised European camping grounds, for being drunken louts, disturbing the peace, and flouting regulations. In family-centred camping grounds, this is unacceptable, but they do not care.
If Singaporeans are sufficiently disciplined to keep their streets clean and litter free, our councils should be requiring us to do likewise and fining us for infringements. I look in the storm water drains when I walk my street, and they are always clogged up with floating cans and plastic bottles. No-one cares.
Some of us freedom-camped before it became part of the vernacular, but seeing how NZ has been trashed by tourists has made me rethink all of my own travelling. Like others, I’ve had a gutsful of busloads of Chinese, driving badly, behaving badly, and failing to respect important places: their behaviour eg in the little church at Tekapo is totally insensitive, and they certainly wouldn’t try it in a mosque or synagogue.
It’s everywhere. I used to wander around Westminster Abbey on an afternoon, with no-one else in sight, now it’s clogged with jabbering tour parties.
In Wellington, we fought two separate battles against the commercial exploitation of the Town Belt, with developers wanting to run gondolas over it, and luges down it, to give sightseers something to do, and it will happen again. We have a dramatically attractive south coast and marine reserve, which my American visitors have loved, but the easy-money boys will junk up anything, and create a Battersea Fun Fair anywhere that they can, to get the obscene tourist dollar.
The mountaineers who come from Europe and the USA, on the whole, are a very different breed; they have their own relationship with the land wherever they are, but the same cannot necessarily be said about the skiers – or the clueless idiots who go ill-prepared into the outback or the alps, and get into difficulty. One of my friends, John Harrison, was long ago killed on Mt Rolleston, in a search and rescue involving a couple of
English adventurers. John left a young widow, and two small children.
I’ve figured that the coronavirus needs to wipe out about 2 billion people before it makes an impact on over – population, but in fact it could be horrendous in poor parts of Africa which it has barely touched as yet.
The whole often pointless meandering of tourist groups – and the groups may be the biggest problem – looking to be entertained by those looking to get their dosh, may self-regulate, but whether or not it does,
the NZ Govt must reflect the values of we who love the land – or sod off.
I agree 100%.
Good article, Martyn. The idea of ’boutique tourism’ is where we should be looking. They are foreigners, – they have to pay and pay well for the experience. No more free rides. Or just don’t come until they can pay.
As for us boomers who holidayed in Thailand?
Hell !- who are they ? – I could never afford to travel in NZ since my backpacking footloose and fancy free days in my twenties… I did however, once travel to Tasmania in that period and loved it and the Aussie culture,… the rest of my life was being on the grind and simply trying to make ends meet on the neo liberal minimum wage lie.
My life experience has been more this …
Love this song btw…
The Pogues – Dirty Old Town
https://youtu.be/s11BuatTuXk?t=100
+100 ….dirty old towns can have charm ( and this song and his teeth)…but I am afraid the same can not be said for Tekapo!….it is a disgusting abomination of new tourist town ….an insult to the loveliness of Lake Tekapo and NEW ZEALAND
Tekapo is a dogs anus tape worm of a town
….a monument to the neoliberal laissez faire consumerist prostitution of NZs natural landscapes…
TOO MANY LEMMINGS ON PLANES .
1. International holidays are a nice to have but not a necessity .
2. Affluent International air travelers have spreads the virus around the world .
3.International hyper tourism is a major contributor to green house gases and accelerated climate change.
With the implementation of a vaccine world airline travel could return to ” Normal ” in around 2 years .
Which is really not “progress ” but rather just another nail in the coffin of the planet .
A major runway extention at Heathrow Aiport was legally quashed recently on legal grounds over the requirement to preserve human life on earth .A small but significant step in the right direction . However …
There is a plan to double the capacity of Changi Airport in Singapore , a 5 year 10 billion investment in future growth of air travel .And so on …
The problem with capitalism is that enough is never enough .This is the central problem of neoliberal economic theory in regard to planetary biosystems stability .
Wall street always requires more growth , year on year. More fuel , more passengers ,more planes,more growth in air travel and by definition more profits and more “progress”. Collectively, infinite growth in a finite world ,always was and always will be a one way trip to planetary ecocide .
From a social philosophy point of view endless growth with finite resources is a logical impossibility, so at some point the model will fail .And fail very badly indeed .
Covid 19 is a significant bump in the road ,to investors on the party bus of endless growth ,but no ones told the driver or the passengers the bridge has been washed out further down the road.,
Our” leaders” have no other mantra than Growth is essential , universal ,unstoppable and in so doing Noeliberal Capitalism has always carried the seeds of its own destruction .
The solution to ever increasing human population and climate breakdown could be political , however after 50 yrs of the climate debate having achieved fuck all we still have no new political paradigm of balance and sustainability .The return of hyper tourism ,based on air travel ,will cement that .
I deeply lament the inability of humanity to produce a coherent collaboration and new sustainable political order and I am profoundly worried about our future ability to achieve this in a realistic time frame .
However ,in the absence of a political solution there will be a biological solution .
Of that I am certain .
German academics have found that almost 2 million Germans may be infected with COVID-19, ten times more than official figures and 1 in 5 of those, don’t even show symptoms! Talk about a complete overreaction!
RM
What? I imagine that connects to the topic of discussion somehow, but you didn’t do that work yourself.
Do you really mean to say that; it is fine by you to allow infected carriers of a novel virus into the country, to prop up the tourism industry?
Anyway, do you have a link for that research? You may be conflating predicted total number of cases (past, present & future) with detected cases (past only & excluding false negatives). Plus there is a big difference between asymptomatic carriers and patients with sub-clinical symptoms. I could provide links to (currently unpay-walled) Lancet papers, if I thought there was any chance of you reading them?
This is second rate, hyperbolic, badly written, nationalistic, bourgeois bullshit. As someone who grew up travelling around in vans and camping, and still do, I can say that the greatest abuse perpetrated in this landscape is by the bloody locals. It’s not back packers and freedom campers dumping building materials, old boots, cloths, car parts, bald tyres, carcasses and god knows what else down that bank by the river at that spot. It’s not the travellers selling crack. It’s not the travellers polluting the rivers, or poisoning the soil, or draining the aquifers. So the odd one gets busted taking a shit in an inappropriate place out of desperation, where the fuck are the public toilets? Where are the rubbish bins? The (faux) recycling stations?
Tourism has brought more money into this country in recent times than bloody dairy farming, and it doesn’t ruin the environment.
Apparently people who don’t want to get robbed by half arsed, slovenly campground owners shouldn’t be allowed to travel… What eves.
@QW, my wife and I are like you in that we travel around AO/NZ in our bus and freedom camp exclusively.
We have seen the damage, rubbish and pollution at various places and agree that it is mainly caused by locals in their car loads doing the domestic tourism thing. Disgusting, shitting behind a bush on the edge of a parking area. People with toilets on board i.e camper vans etc don’t do it. Desperate people in cars are the culprits, no toilet on board, desperate to go, no fucking toilets anywhere, so what happens?Bloody logical. Camping grounds are a ripoff, noisy, crowded and very much a last resort for us. Park up at nice coastal spot, all alone no one around, peace and harmony, toilet on board. Dam fine.
Quinn Williams and Green Bus, that’s my experience too. Too often, freedom campers are a scapegoat and distraction from greater environmental crimes. Though we have overdone tourism in the South Island generally. Places we used to camp quietly with four other campers ten years ago, in recent years would have 400.
‘We must also add to the tourism industry the obscene amount of pollution air travel generates. In a rapidly warming planet, these green house gas emissions can not be tolerated, so hyper tourism must die for the planet to survive.’
Actually, the planet is doing fine. It is responding to the outrageous behavior of “the plague of greedy apes”* exactly the way we would expect it to behave: by overheating at a rate unprecedented in geological history!
This extraordinary overheating is a direct consequence of the huge ‘pulse’ of carbon dioxide released into the atmosphere over the last 250 years or so that is a result of industrious industrial humans desequestering hundreds of billions of tonnes of carbon -carbon that the planet had sequestered (in the form of coal, oil, natural gas and kerogen) over hundreds of millions of years, sometimes referred to as ‘ancient sunlight’.
So, here we are, nearly 140 ppm above the pre-industrial level of CO2 in the atmosphere [of 280 ppm] and nearly 190 ppm above the recent 800,000-year average [of 230 ppm] with the government thinking of ways to squander yet more fossil fuels and destabilise climate systems even more than they are already destabilized, and promote faster meltdown of the planet than is already taking place (and acidify the oceans a bit more, placing the ocean food chain in even greater peril than it already is).
Who needs [vertebrate] fish when we can eat jellyfish, right?
So we are going to loose oysters and pipis, and scallops -never mind, we can always turn to eating garden snails, right? (That is the ever-declining portion of the populace that has a garden)
Yet to be seen is the extent of the Arctic meltdown this season (September minimum) but the start point of the ice cover for this northern Hemisphere summer is extraordinarily low.
https://nsidc.org/arcticseaicenews/
Yes, we live in extraordinary times, times in which politicians and ‘community leaders’ actively promote the destruction of their own progeny’s future, and large portion of the misled [and generally ignorant] populace clamor for faster environmental meltdown..
*I came across that “plague of greedy apes” phrase about 15 years ago on an energy-environment blog, and find it the best descriptor of industrial humans who have overrun the Earth and have severely destabilised (or almost utterly destroyed) most of the natural systems that make life-as-we-know-it possible -largely in the pursuit of short-term convenience, comfort and pleasure. And all of that convenience, comfort and pleasure is to be paid for by those that follow, who will have no convenience, little comfort and only non-fossil-fuel-dependent pleasure as the world overheats to the point of becoming largely uninhabitable for humans and most other extant vertebrate species, since we are on track for +3oC,+4oC, +5oC,+6oC….who knows how overheated? as the same kind of greed and stupidity that got us to +1.5oC continues unabated, and no government takes environmental meltdown seriously -preferring to promote squandering of fossil fuels to keep the populace temporarily happy and to keep Ponzi financial systems functioning [in a dysfunctional manner, of course) just a little longer instead.
GB
How do you get your bus from NZ to OZ? Or do you have a different one in each country?
Anyway, people who have campervans with internal toilets do still poo outside the vehicle. There is a perverse incentive for them to do so, because (some) rental companies will charge cleaning costs if the toilet is used by hirer.
Yes QM, there should certainly be more public toilets, or at least a willingness to bury one’s own waste (it doesn’t take up much space to pack a spade for a trench latrine, but if you are doing that – an old paint bucket and some disinfectant isn’t that difficult either). However, the way public facilities are perceived to become over-run with freedom campers, means that is unlikely to be a priority for councils.
But locals and domestic tourists are quite different groups. Sure, some locals (especially borderline farmers) will pollute shamelessly; trusting that no one wants to start a feud by dobbing them in. However, others will volunteer their weekends to go out and clean beaches of others junk. Domestic tourists do certainly have some entitled arseholes who feel justified in shitting over everything because they “pay their taxes” (a statement I find as suspicious as someone saying “to be honest”). But there are entire fluid communities of housetruckers and the like, who are less antisocial.
Plus the homeless, who are already doing it hard; so I am more willing to cut them slack. There used to be a quote that went something like; “the law is impartial in that it forbids both the rich and poor to sleep under bridges”. But in 21st century Aotearoa, we’ve turned that on its head: It’s fine for anyone who can afford a vehicle with a blue sticker to sleep anywhere they want, while those too poor to jump through that hoop are liable to fines and potential imprisonment.
New Zealand is already an extremely expensive destination, even for so-called “budget” travelers. Good luck seeing any economic recovery with this arrogant jingoism.
My experience with international travellers is that they say New Zealand is an over-priced, over-hyped rip-off.
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