Remaking tourism

Sunday column

If you can call domestic tourism a patriotic act then it has been a pleasure to serve my country for a couple of weeks. 

We have been doing our small bit to fill some of the void left by thousands and thousands of coach loads of international visitors. 

In Queenstown and Te Anau and Milford Sound your footfalls can echo loud and lonely in cafes and shops and car parks. There were shuttered hotels, restaurants with chairs on the tables, handwritten signs on the door saying sorry but we’re closed until further.  

You can see it in our own seaside village, too, a bit. No cruise ships, no streams of visitors coming up one side of the main street and back down the other wearing an expression that says when does the exciting thing happen, I don't know what I’m supposed to be looking for really, let's go into this shop and buy some meaningless thing. Places that depend on those people are not doing well, and some of them have already gone.

You have all this on your mind as you do your patriotic duty, on boats, on lakes, in fiords, hauling your pack up and over windswept tracks, generally loving our beautiful wilderness

Also you have on your mind, thanks to one ranger talk after another - sometimes illustrated with video -  the depredations of mustelid predators. Meaning: evil fucking stoats killing our beautiful birds, all of them. The Kea, the Tui, the Riroriro, the Korimako, all prey to sharp toothed tree-scaling killing-machine rodents.

Not the sandfly, mind. The official bird of Fiordland is still doing real good.

As you do all this, tourism’s two great problems are fully on your mind and those are: 

• Currently not enough tourists 

  and 

• Usually too many damn tourists

You also have on your mind the evil stoats.

And you also have earworm from tourism minister Stuart Nash that you just cannot lose.

He was on the radio the other day laying out a proposition for giving the cold shoulder to freeloading dirty freedom campers and rolling out the welcome mat for high net worth individuals to enjoy our helicopters and fine dining and whatnot.

He said

There are a hell of a lot of discerning travelers, wealthy travellers who..are looking across at our little country here going That. Is. Paradise. If you're sitting in your apartment in Paris in lockdown and you see a photo of Milford Sound, ...you’re gonna go I wanna piece of that. It's like paradise.

He’s quite right, there’s so very much to love about what we have here. There’s no doubt the world's wealthy are gonna wanna have a bidda that. 

But he made it sound deeply unlovely, a kind of abasement, laying a tender hand on the thigh of a high net worth individual. 

Is there a better way?

The coaches are empty right now because the borders are closed. At some point that will all be over, probably, and normal service will resume. That will be welcome news for many struggling businesses and livelihoods. 

But it could also carry us back around to the previous problem: too many, too much. 

These huge numbers are straining our resources, trashing our beautiful tracks and rivers and lakes and landscape.

Who brought us this abundance? Who delivered this sustained untrammelled boom? 

Take a bow, John Key. In his customary whatever style he took the idea that if it was great to have a million tourists a year, how great would it be to have 4 mill?

Get stuck in, let her rip, never mind the boxing, start pouring concrete. More rooms! More coaches! More people saying when does the exciting thing happen, I don't know, what I’m  looking for, really, let's go into this shop and buy some meaningless thing. 

How about we make tourism into something better that doesn't trash the place?

Easily said, not so easily done. People have livelihoods riding on things staying the way they are.

Is it possible to manage things in a way that achieves a just transition to a new better sustainable arrangement?

How about this? Why not do our tourism differently to the way they do it in other places? Why not make it altogether different and special? 

Why not make conservation the whole idea? Why nor make the conservation activities actual tourism activities? 

Why not make conservation the beating heart of the entire tourist experience? 

The Predator Free 2050 programme is excellent but it needs way more resources, so how about this: you fund the hell out of it and you make it an actual tourism experience all of its own.

Come help run a trap line!

Become a donor!

Buy the naming rights to this bird so we can fund her protection and come walk this track and see if you can spot her!

Come buy another trap and put your name on it!

Come  and place it on the trail along this track!

Would this be enough to sustain the volumes we had reached? Possibly not. Possibly we might not want to sustain them. 

Part of the just transition might be to move people from jobs in tourism into jobs in conservation. How about pushing huge amounts of money over to DOC to employ a conservation corps of people to get rid of every last pest and plant native trees and restore critical habitats? This wouldn't just be some token make work job idea, it would be goddamn billions, to get things changed in a meaningful way.

And how about we tackle the freedom camper question this way: every visitor pays, say, a thousand dollars to come here. That would entitle them to a bunch of vouchers to all the facilities we want them to be using, the places with showers and toilets and so on. We don't want freedom campers freeloading, but that doesn't necessarily mean we don't want freedom campers. Let them come here and make the place better, how about that?

There’s not all that much to like about either of the two models being considered so far, namely the present one, pushing more and more punters through the turnstiles; or the one the new minister likes, fawning over high net worth individuals who wanna bidda that.

I’m keener on tourism on our own terms, making the very most of what we have here.

This idea might not appeal to some, maybe, many, kinds of visitors. Good. That’s how you make it sustainable. Our tourism can be an active engagement, not a mindless consumption.

Our proposition to visitors could be this: 

By making this land predator free, we will one day once more have a dawn chorus of native birds so loud you can't hear yourself think. 

The experience will be out of this world. Come and help us make it real.

And one day come back and hear it.