Freedom campers – opinions for and against
Perhaps I have my late summer rose-coloured sunnies on but it looks as if the annual hysteria about irresponsible tourists may be at less of a fever pitch this year. Given the constant stream of stories about tourist drivers in recent weeks, that may seem like a bold call, especially given that I am working on just such a story at the moment. But the case I’m reporting is more nuanced than the ‘‘Bad Tourist Driver Causes Crash’’ headlines of late and we seem to be having a much more balanced public conversation about such issues than I’ve seen in previous summers.
A fracas over freedom camping is a summer staple, as reliable as a case of sunburn at Kaiteriteri. Someone claims to have seen a freedom camper pooing in the bushes or dumping rubbish and the story reverberates, fuelled by prejudice against young backpackers that too often veers into the lane of outright racism.
Motueka man Daniel Jackson called me last month to tell me he had come across a dozen or so freedom campers at the mouth of the Motueka River and he was appalled by the mess they had left, including an old couch. When I went to investigate, the couch and mess was gone and there was no sign of any campers. Daniel was pleased the council had cleared the mess and in conversation with me, the mess was his main concern.
A week later, he was quoted in a front page Nelson Mail story as saying, about freedom campers: ‘‘We don’t want them. We want people who are contributing to the economy . . . they can go back where they came from.’’
I read a comment on the story
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alastair.paulin@fairfaxmedia.co.nz in response to that quote, along the lines of, ‘‘as soon as I read the phrase, ‘go back to where you came from’ I ignored everything else he had to say.’’ In other words, if you want to stereotype freedom campers as freeloading polluters, then I can’t take your views seriously. That struck me as a sign of someone with an open mind on the issue.
Charles Anderson, who wrote that story, approached it with an open mind too. Rather than just seize on the most inflammatory comments about freedom campers, which too many stories have done in the past, he went to Waitapu bridge in Golden Bay, a hot spot for freedom campers, and asked them why they were camping there, next to a Tasman District Council sign that said ‘‘Freedom camping in self-contained vehicles only’’. Their answers, along with portraits of the campers, ran above the story he wrote, giving prominence to a side of the story that is often underplayed – the voices of the freedom campers themselves.
You might expect that Motueka Top 10 camping ground owner Steve Edwards would be opposed to freedom campers, on the grounds that if it were to be outlawed, the people who camp for free are more likely to pay $46 for a camping site at his place. (The two are not comparable, by the way, since $46 gets you an impressive range of facilities in a lovely setting as opposed to the non-existent facilities in freedom camping spots). And to a certain extent he is. But his beef with freedom campers is more the damage they are doing to the local environment than lost revenue.
He is a vocal advocate for the benefits of tourism, arguing that people who dismiss tourists underestimate the value they bring to Motueka.
‘‘When they rock in our door, the first thing we do after booking that first night for $46 is to try to sell them a $150 kayak trip, or at least a water taxi for $35 to $60, and then we tell them about all there is to do in the region and we sell them another night. Then they want to know where the grocery story is, that’s another $100, the petrol station, another $100, and then they’ll ask where to go for tea – that’s another $100.’’
Steve tells this story to illustrate his point that you need to get tourist in front of you in order to upsell them, and freedom campers hidden down by the river don’t present that opportunity to turn a night’s camping fee into a stay that can easily be worth $700 to the town. But you can also draw a different conclusion from it: that tourists, no matter where they are staying or if they are paying for accommodation at all, spend much more on the services associated with their stay than they do on the obvious things like a night in a motel.
When Steve and I talk about freedom campers, he concedes that the perennial subject generates 50 opinions for and against the practice, and probably always will. I argue that freedom campers spend on activities rather than more traditional tourist services – their priorities are having experiences such as skydiving and kayaking rather than staying in an attractive camping ground. Steve counters that at least he can prove his guests spend on other services, because he helps them do it, and it is much more difficult to prove that freedom campers contribute in other ways. I also argue that if a freedom camper has a good experience in New Zealand as a free- wheeling budget-conscious 20-something, they are more likely to make New Zealand a destination as a bigger-spending 40-something with kids in tow.
On holiday in Thailand what we spent in four weeks with a family of five was about the same amount we spent in nine months as a back-packing 20-something couple in Asia.
We also appear to have a more measured response to foreign tourist drivers. The few early reports of key-snatching quickly gave way to people arguing that Kiwis are just as likely to be driving dangerously as those less familiar with our roads. A judge sentencing a Austrian tourist caught speeding at 171kph south of Hokitika last weekend described him as ‘‘ no more idiotic than the drivers we see who are New Zealanders offending in the same fashion up and down the country’’.
A neighbour told me today about chasing down a dangerous driver who had obliviously turned in front of him and who was ‘‘very lucky’’ not to have been crashed into at the notorious intersection I’ll be writing about.
When he went up to the campervan window to give them a stern talking to, he discovered a set of Kiwi grandparents with their granddaughter sitting in the front passenger seat, exactly the spot he had just avoided smashing.
Instead of shouting at the driver he asked him how he would feel if his dangerous manoeuvre had led to his granddaughter’s death. It is a question we could all benefit from asking ourselves. When it comes to driving, we would do well to follow the biblical advice of removing the log from our own eye in order to more clearly see the speck in our brother’s.