Is the NZ media coverage of British tourists embarrassing yet?

Remember that time back in the 1990s when Jeremy Wells was chased out of Gore after he proclaimed it was the gay capital of NZ? The story goes that an angry local lynch mob turned up outside the Gore motel he was staying at and made threats to beat him for his hilarious slur.

I feel this bizarre media focus on these British tourists carried some of the hallmarks of that small town vigilantism that Wells encountered.

Beyond the petty joy of the daily schadenfreude of breathless media updates on rudeness, littering, minor theft and children brandishing verbal threats of handing out the bash, there is a deep seated resentment towards tourists by the locals that kept this story alive well beyond it’s initial 15 minutes of Nek Minit infamy.

We have almost 5 million people living here and each year 4 million tourists visit us. Our infrastructure can’t cope with almost our entire population visiting us and this stress is creating friction. The outpouring of anger at ungrateful visiting dickheads went well beyond any rational response and the media clickbait fed that anger.

The media coverage was shallow, but the response highlighted a symptom of something far darker.

Māori Climate Commissioner Donna Awatere Huata has called on a re-evaluation of our cheap tourism  industry and asked if it’s sustainable.

I would suggest that it is not.