Rethinking immigration & tourism with a quarantine border

The new reality of a quarantine border needs urgent attention because with the pandemic raging globally, we can’t let down our guard. This means that we need an urgent rethink of the quarantine border infrastructure, immigration and tourism.

Quarantine Border Infrastructure:

More staff now:

They need vastly more staff to process the huge numbers wanting to return to NZ. The oversights that we’ve seen spring into leaks at the border have been mostly driven by not enough people providing oversight and actual staff at the coalface.

Matching infrastructure to need:

Hotels won’t be making money from tourism for sometime, so they must house returning citizens and permanent residents for the mandatory quarantine times at full cost to the state. Private employers wanting to pay for their workers to enter NZ should be able to do so at cost to them, while the boutique tourism industry should be able to build infrastructure for wealthy tourists who can pay to gain entry using special tourism tax used to pay for the extra border security.

 

Rethink Immigration:

Migrant Worker Amnesty:

We can’t entice migrant workers here, have them exploited by unscrupulous bosses and then tell them to piss off back home. That is cruel and nasty. We should offer an immediate amnesty to all migrant workers in NZ to become permanent residents BUT right after that amnesty, we must close all immigration until a vaccine is widely available. Employers will need to use the existing work force here if they want to expand, this would end the bullshit games of companies claiming no NZer wants to be a burger king manager or booze seller so we need to import those workers. You either pay proper wages to attract someone to your job or you don’t get an employee. Those migrant workers who left NZ as the borders closed however are not due any special protection or aid, they are simply the unlucky and a Government isn’t responsible for unlucky foreign workers.

Universal Union Membership for all migrant workers:

The ease with which exploitation of migrant workers is so rampant throughout NZ demands a response that is serious and only compulsory Union membership of all migrant workers will force the exploitation to end.

High Tech Migration:

Seeing as most of the planet will shut down and stay shut down to international tourism until a vaccine is available, you will only be focused on high end tourism who can afford the 2 weeks, backpackers and freedom campers are gone. We must also be open to tech companies wanting to relocate their head offices here so that people can live openly in a plague free environment which will quickly become our international selling point.

Homecoming:

We also need to be prepared for a mass homecoming of the Kiwi diaspora who are feeling the pinch in Australia and Europe, who are looking at NZs distance as its saving grace now. We should reach out to them and say ‘there’s never been a better time to return Home’ campaigns and bring their expertise and skill sets back to NZ to help generate the next wave of Kiwi entrepreneurs we require to kick start the economy again in the new realty.

Our migration will surge from returning citizens and permanent residents making the needs of migrant workers even less likely to be heard or supported.

 

Rethink Tourism:

Domestic Tourism:

Watching exclusive overpriced NZ Tourism having to beg actual kiwis to visit them at massively discounted prices is wondrous isn’t it? Some of our most spectacular places now affordable for the foreseeable future AND our roads free from hyper tourism too?

Thanks Covid19!

We should look at an extra couple of holidays each year to elongate our long weekends, but the tourism business must change their price gouging to entice Kiwi’s along for the long weekend experience and we should culturally look to celebrate the Kiwi Long Weekend.

Boutique Tourism:

One of the good things about the tourism reset is that we must move from hyper tourism to boutique tourism.

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 with a tourism tax.

The industry will baulk at 14 day quarantine’s plus a new tourism tax, but what is the price for a plague free holiday? Ask anyone in Paris, New York or London.

 

There are enormous structural changes coming our way in a post pandemic world and we need to see ourselves as one of the life boats on a climate crisis planet. Immigration is an area we need to urgently reform so that when external shocks occur, we are flexible enough to sustain them.

This pandemic hasn’t ended and it won’t end until there is a vaccine available.

 

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