Tourism model extracts economic value but gives little back
With dairy prices falling and the economy flat lining, many are looking at tourism as the new economic saviour. Indeed, tourism has risen to one of the most significant foreign exchange earners for New Zealand, and beat dairy revenues in 2015. Tourism earned almost $30 billion in the year ending March 2015 including domestic tourism worth $18 billion. That’s 4.9% of GDP with a further 3.6% indirect economic value. Tourism generated economic activity estimated at $81 million per day, including $32 million in foreign exchange and $49 million from domestic spend. Foreign exchange from tourism has grown more than 40% since 2013, and NZ tourism industry associations have a growth target of $41 billion earnings by 2025. 12% of employed New Zealanders work directly or indirectly in tourism, with about 296,000 people working in the visitor economy, though these are often precarious and low paid jobs.
New Zealand’s natural environment and associated ‘brand’ provide our tourism industry with a competitive advantage, according to the Tourism Export Council of New Zealand. At least 35% of international visitors come here primarily to experience our natural landscapes and other values, and most of these are associated with the public conservation estate managed by the Department of Conservation. Our natural heritage shapes the Kiwi identity, and underpins much of the rest of our economy, such as primary production. However, lack of infrastructure and Department of Conservation funding deficits threaten to kill the golden tourism goose and to trample on its eggs.
Our biodiversity is already declining and visitor pressures exceed capacity, and when this is set in the context of wider environmental damage and enclosure of the commons, it’s hard to see how the tourism growth model can be environmentally or economically sustainable.
Most of the adverse press about the impacts of tourism and tourists focusses on freedom campers. While undoubtedly there are impacts from the sheer volume of travellers (freedom campers and otherwise) and a relative absence of facilities, this issue distracts from a wider systemic tragedy that trashes our special places, mismanages natural heritage, and alienates public open space that should be habitat for rare and precious species as well as places for the public to enjoy.
Even though DoC is in control of one third of the country’s land mass, including almost half of the South Island, only a quarter of the estate receives active conservation management, and only 8% receives possum, rat and stoat control.
There are also impacts on these special places that are beyond DoC’s reach. A single dog can wipe out a valued penguin colony that has intrinsic, species and economic value, from which there is little chance to recover. Hauraki Gulf islands are filthy with rubbish from urban Auckland while boat loads of visitors walk beaches and paths. Iconic marine mammals such as Hector’s dolphins and New Zealand sea lions face extinction from trawling entrapment. Penguins, a tourism symbol of the South, live on the margins of survival squeezed between farming and coastal campers and erosion. We’re failing to address both core pest management and wider conservation issues, threatening the key attractions for all those visitors on whom our economy increasingly depends.
New Zealand represents ‘wild nature, remoteness, peace and quiet, recreation, and natural heritage opportunities to ‘get away from it all’’. But with around three million overseas tourists last year, as well as all the kiwis, both ecological decline and visitor pressures, threaten those very values.
A lot of the pressure concentrates on key visitor points, such as the Tongariro crossing, Abel Tasman National Park, Milford Sound.… Magnificent ‘remote’ locations at the end of the earth, so full of vehicles and vessels, boats, buses, planes, helicopters and people that nature is dwarfed by the hubbub of visitors and ancillary activities. That means people also go further afield and to ever more distant areas searching for authentic ‘remote’ experiences along with everyone else on the trail. Those millions of visitors are both concentrated and dispersed.
Natural features and species are commodified into tourism assets. Penguin colonies are enclosed and treated as living zoos for busloads of tourists to watch as they come ashore after a day out foraging. Boat loads of people in love with the idea of seeing or swimming with wild dolphins harangue them from dawn to dusk and impact on their natural behaviour, affecting individual and species health. Multi-storey cruise ships dwarf the landscapes of Milford and Dusky Sound and Akaroa Harbour. Megabucks are charged for wildlife experiences that should be New Zealander’s free birth right, but which fail to mitigate negative impacts in the meantime.
Elsewhere independent travellers in private vehicles or any of the thousands of cars and campervans from the 35 fleets of hire vehicles, tour around stimulating the New Zealand economy, but visitors think they can pet sea lions, chase birds, smuggle geckos, climb mountains without any preparation. The results are aversion responses, displacement and poorer breeding success for native species as humans increasingly invade their space.
In the relative absence of adequate public utilities on the tourist trail, rubbish and toilet waste collects in laybys. When this is added to the background level of industrial and packaging waste lining our beaches, we’re definitely not so clean and green.
New Zealand’s tourism opportunities offer much to both kiwis and to travellers from the rest of the world. But we can’t just leave it to the market, while the Government gets the GST and tax revenues and the glory. To properly mitigate the impacts of the tourism boom, proper social and environmental infrastructure is required. That means DoC should be investing in more ecological conservation, not just cafes and visitor centres. It means educating the public about the sensitivity of ecosystems and their inhabitants, not just clipping the ticket and taking profit from admission fees. If we don’t collectively manage all these visitors, in ten or twenty years, the values and qualities we’re all here to see, will be so diminished that travellers will go elsewhere to find the authentic ,‘pure’ natural experiences we were once known for.
It’s short sighted to market our brand to overseas tourists on our natural beauty and heritage when biodiversity is declining, many of our animal ‘attractions’ are threatened with extinction, and rivers and bays are too polluted for swimming. New Zealand’s not a theme park, and even if it was, its natural ‘assets’ would deserve better care. DoC has an annual budget of only $340 million compared with $30 billion generated by tourism. The current model extracts economic value but puts little back.
Christine is currently traveling around the South Island, camping, tramping, cycling and kayaking.
We could tighten those numbers up a bit. Let’s say we wanted to maintain Aucklands average income at around 80k. Each job would have to earn 200k, the employee doesn’t receive the whole 200k, that’s about how much each employee has to produce to earn 80k.
If you look at farming each job earns about 250k, just above what we need to maintain average incomes. But tourism? That earns 60k per job, well below what we need to maintain average incomes. Tourism is good for employee low skilled workers, but it ain’t a road to prosperity.
With out dairy and an over emphases on tourism, New Zealand will be a poor country. We have to look to manufacturing to maintain average incomes.
if DOC sent staff to all carparks along Milford Rd and fined each tourist who feeds keas it would raise a lot of money.
if DOC sent staff to all carparks along Milford Rd and fined each tourist who feeds keas it would raise a lot of money.
People fly from overseas, get into campervans and drive all the way around NZ, they come in huge cruise ships, then huge buses grunting thier way down the Otago peninsula road right past where I live. They come in droves like drones to look at a few Yellow Eyed penguins clinging on the edge of existence.
Then they are off to see a few albatrosses nesting at the Heads behind prison fences. While I look at the sick looking barren land devoid of the fantastic native bush which once grew here. A few pathetic looking sheep now dispersed over what was bird filled forest. LIFE/ for DEATH.
It is just sad, very very sad, all these forests all these birds gone or vanishing before my eyes.
What are we leaving behind, CO2 is now at levels of another epoch, but they still come in huge machines to gork (through another machine) at the last few birds left.
What a stupid, STUPID! species we are. Hence I am leaving this dying area as fast as I can, as far as I can see most of this country has been totally destroyed, slaughtered, scalped and climate change will thrash the remaining REAL LIFE left.
The tourists are blind, like the rest of our culture. Even RNZ has a feature on endangered creatures of NZ, and it honestly freaks me out as they talk of how cute these animals are, like it is a big joke. That show puts a creeping chill up my spine, they are not getting how horrendously obscene extinction of any species is. The human race has the whole planet in a head lock, all life on earth is now a resource to plunder for a quick buck. Something to be proud of aye.
It is going to end very, very badly. We have taken and not put back.
Tourism -as generally defined- does not generate anything except pollution. Tourism is simply a form of ostentatious consumption, and provides a mechanism to transfer digital fiat wealth from one place to another whilst trashing the planet.
The high CO2 emissions profile that tourism has is the prime cause of the Planetary Meltdown we are currently witnessing. It follows that tourism is a major contributor to the extinction of humans and most other species which is underway now.
CO2 at 404ppm (and still rising) is the highest ever, and Arctic ice cover is the lowest ever as a consequence
http://nsidc.org/arcticseaicenews/
with a distinct probability the Arctic will become ice-free this year, thereby taking the Earth into new, unprecedented phase of climate chaos and overheating.
+100 – Our governments are robbing Kiwis of their future – it is like killing the golden goose economically but also spiritually which seem to have zero value anymore in our imposed neoliberal ideology.
Yes the world has become a huge ferris wheel ride with each stop being a ‘tourist attraction’ along with all the other hideous fair ground and night life trash which comes along with human entertainment.
Steady on the Natzis have only got us in the hole for $120,000,000,000.00 to date from $10,000,000,000.00 when they took over 7 years ago, soon we will be able to market ourselves as the Greece of the South Pacific?
Water quality aint good these days, whats happened to our inanga and our crystal clear rivers and streams. Waikato River is full of carp and they are already in certain areas of Lake Taupo.
Tourism hasn’t worked for Greece and it’s a very popular destination….building super highways didn’t help either.Crikey, why does Key think it will work here?
‘why does Key think it will work here?’
Probably because Key has shares in hotels, airlines, bus companies and oil companies.
This is a good post, I must say, it raises valid questions and presents stuff to consider.
All those supporting tourism as a growth industry should also consider that most people coming here come by airplane, and airplanes have so far a very bad record when it comes to air pollution and CO2 and other greenhouse gases, which are responsible for climate change.
So people come here and leave a massive carbon foot print, to be honest, which is not what we should be encouraging.
The there is the fact that economically tourism tends to create mostly low paid employment, and thus little gains for economies of scale, apart from earning foreign reserves.
Look at the countries all over the globe that depend on tourism, they are hardly the successful and wealthy countries that there are. In Europe Greece depends a lot on tourism, and see how their economy has performed.
And many tourists here will leave more of a carbon foot print by driving rental cars and camper vans, they will leave more rubbish behind and as tourism is a business sector activity, all the branding will in the end just be that, an image for those overseas, that is far from the reality behind the image.
Maori perform welcomes and the Haka for tourists, but apart from that only live their culture at special events and on Waitangi Day. It shows that a culture has largely been lost, as most live westernised lives, but tourists are sold the impression, our native population still live like they did when Captain Cook arrived.
All this makes a mockery of our country, and our bit of culture we have, and more if this may be lost, the more we change the infrastructure and environment to accommodate millions of short term visitors, by building more hotels, backpacker hostels, roads, bungi jumping facilities, by having more rafting on rivers, by compromising left over native forests and so.
Very careful management is needed, not only in trying to prevent visitors bringing in pests that may destroy the environment and even perhaps harm our agricultural sector. Perhaps we should also encourage more visitors to come by ship, rather than airplanes.
To have a sound economy we should rather focus on more important sectors that can be developed, also by creating value added products and services.
“It means educating the public about the sensitivity of ecosystems and their inhabitants, not just clipping the ticket and taking profit from admission fees. If we don’t collectively manage all these visitors, in ten or twenty years, the values and qualities we’re all here to see, will be so diminished that travellers will go elsewhere to find the authentic ,‘pure’ natural experiences we were once known for.”
Sadly the bulk of modern day urban New Zealanders, and the ever growing migrant communities, have little understanding and appreciation of the sensitivities of our natural environment. Indeed most seem to treat it as a commodity, and that applies more so to tourists.
With a media that does not inform much about the environmental realities and challenges we have, we will not see this improve, I fear. It is all now business, more business and more dollars for those that make business, that determines what goes on in New Zealand.
Look at Hawaii and Tahiti, and many other places, to see how tourism has destroyed the local environment and also culture of the people living there, all for money and more business.
That is what New Zealand faces, as it seems to repeat the same madness.
Why not allocate funds to DoC from the huge GST take from the tourism industry and also use the same source to assist local government in areas where tourism is strong, to allow them to cope with the infrastructure demand placed on them by the industry.