Turning the double edged sword
Whether tourism is good or bad is up to us, writes Kevin Kiernan
AN old axiom cautions that tourism is like fire, because while it can cook your food and keep you warm if managed properly, if poorly attended it can also burn down your house. Whether good or bad is delivered depends on the degree to which the natural, cultural and social values present are recognised; any risks to those values are properly understood; the decisions made concerning permissible activities and visitor numbers; and the professionalism and diligence brought to bear.
Obtaining informed consent from host communities, ensuring that local people benefit to a proportionate degree, and ensuring benefits are shared fairly among them are all important considerations when seeking to secure and retain a social licence for a tourism enterprise. Should a developer simply exercise sufficient political clout to ride roughshod over local feelings, attempts to obtain a social licence are unlikely to bear fruit.
The wisdom of regarding tourism as an economic panacea rather than seeking to build more self-reliant communities as a long-term economic strategy is very much open to question. Some will undoubtedly earn worthwhile profits or income from tourism, but such benefits are not evenly distributed.
The higher prices that tourists are prepared to pay for meals, accommodation and services lead to general price increases. These must then be paid by the host community as well, a large proportion of which is thus delivered an increasing financial burden by tourism rather than enhanced well-being. As increasingly expensive restaurants proliferate, other more modest t cheap cafes feel compelled to upgrade to stay competitive. While the well-off among the host community may be able to bear the cost, many more cannot do so.
Workers drawn by employment opportunities must pay the prices demanded of them for accommodation. Hence, rents and property values rise for everybody, further disadvantaging uninvolved locals and displacing them from what was previously their home. Services essential to residents may be displaced as shops and other premises are taken over by enterprises catering to tourists. When a large proportion of the money generated is removed from the local economy such benefits as the host community might otherwise have theoretically enjoyed are further reduced.
The people of Bali were never consulted when its Dutch colonisers began to promote the island as a holiday retreat. Tourists now consume 65 per cent of the island’s water resources, marginalising local farmers who are also continually being displaced from their lands by increased property values around tourist nodes. About 1000ha of agricultural land has been lost annually over the last 20 years. In some cases tourism is effectively another wave of colonialism, with those who move in seeking profits progressively outnumbering those whose home they have invaded.
There is increasing resistance worldwide to the phenomenon that is being termed “overtourism”. In Venice, local residents have long been voicing their objections to the crowds of tourists that impede them as they seek to go about their everyday business; the tourist t shops that are pushing out merchants who supply domestic necessities; and soaring rents that have priced d all but the richest out of the housing market. Since 1966 the population of Venice has almost halved. The city that once ruled an empire now contains fewer citizens than the northern suburbs of Hobart. The people of Venice e want their city back. In Barcelona some citizens have taken to posting signs that leave tourists in no doubt that they are unwelcome.
Notwithstanding tourism having played a major role in Iceland’s recovery from its 2008 economic crisis, support for it is in pronounced decline. There is more intense environmental pressure; infrastructure is suffering; real estate speculation has run rife; an excessively economic focus has taken an increasingly
Tourism is also especially exposed in the event of economic downturns.
severe cultural toll; and criminal behaviour such as evasion of taxes related to home sharing through such mechanisms as Airbnb has eaten into Iceland’s social fabric.
The behaviour of many of the tourists who now flock to Bali demonstrates contemptuous disregard for the cultural sensitivities of many Balinese. Hints of a similar disregard are contained within the complaints of some advocates for construction of a cable-car on kunanyi/Mt Wellington when they decry the time taken for its approval to be obtained, on the basis that other places have been able to establish cable cars more quickly. Their complaints show no recognition of the possibility that the people of Hobart may value their mountain more highly than those who have allowed more rapid development elsewhere, or that others may simply have had development imposed upon them irrespective of their wishes.
A tourismtourism cultureculture that discounts those whose home it has moved into is also likely to in some respects discount the tourists themselves, treating them largely as a commodity. Setting prices according to the value of the product becomes overtaken by pricing that is more geared to what visitors are prepared to pay. Any perception of poor value for money, or simply of being ripped off, further erodes the potential social benefits for both visitors and host community alike. Any fair
comparison of the value for money currently being provided for tourists in some other places with the grasping at every available opportunity that is now so evident in Tasmania, would suggest that without some significant changes in attitude the goose responsible for laying Tasmania’s golden tourist eggs may be not long for the cookpot. Tourism is also especially exposed in the event of economic downturns. The global economic crisis of 2008-09 bit most severely in developed countries that were the principal source of tourists. Arrivals declined worldwide, the only exceptions being a handful of developing countries whose tourist source lay outside Europe and North America. Is it really wise for Tasmanians to run the risk of putting put all their economic eggs into just one potential basket-case?
As climate change bites deeper, tourism will also be affected by changes in seasonal weather patterns and increasingly frequent and intense weather events. Disruptions and costs will arise in relation to maintenance and replacement of infrastructure or assets that were never designed to cope with the climate that they must begin to endure. Social tensions are likely to intensify should host communities be expected to pay for the installation and maintenance of infrastructure if its main function is to allow those entrepreneurs benefitting from mass tourism to maximise the profits they take away to their shareholders.
If Tasmania is not to ultimately suffer a similar fate to the Balis, Venices and Barcelonas, then at the very least it must adopt a model of connoisseur rather than conveyor-belt tourism.