It’s fair to charge foreigners more
that the Green Party released a policy that would see every international visitor charged an extra $14 to $18 at the border, later raised to $20, whether or not they were walking our tracks. The Greens expected the levy would raise $58 million per year towards making New Zealand predatorfree. The National Party policy is much less ambitious. It is expected to raise $4m per year, all of which will go to Department of Conservation (DOC) programmes. It came on the same day that Conservation Minister Maggie Barry announced an extra $5.4m per year for community conservation. But these are tiny figures compared to DOC’s already pressured annual budget of $376m.
Rather than the sum raised, National’s policy should receive attention for its philosophical shift. This is a user-pays policy. Recognising that our great outdoors is a significant tourist draw, it makes foreign visitors pay their way while New Zealanders are still able to do the Great Walks at current, lower rates.
Despite their popularity, the Great Walks run at a $1m loss. It seems fair that international visitors pay extra. The policy says that from October 2018, international visitors will pay double the fee on the five most popular Great Walks, which are Milford, Routeburn, Kepler, Abel Tasman and Tongariro, and 50 per cent more on the other Great Walks and back country hut passes. There will also be charges applied to the Paparoa National Park Track, which is still being constructed, and two further Great Walks planned in the 2017 Budget.
The last fee increase, in May 2017, applied equally to locals and foreigners. At the time, a DOC media release said that about 60 per cent of Great Walks visitors were international and ‘‘the feedback we often get is how amazing they are and how cheap’’.
There is a sense that we have been almost giving ourselves away to tourists. The release compared the $54 charged per night for the Milford Track, ‘‘arguably the greatest walk in the world’’, with the Three Capes Track in Tasmania which costs around $180 per night. DOC said that the Great Walks network hosted 120,000 people over the previous year.
This week’s announcement also hinted at an unresolved tension in DOC. The line between tourism infrastructure and conservation is a fine one and budgets tend to be split almost evenly between recreation and natural heritage.
In this light, any policies that help to put a little more resources towards what many see as DOC’s core business at the expense of tourists must be seen as positive, even if the scale of the policy and the sums raised still seem cautious compared to the ‘‘taonga levy’’ floated by the Green Party.
- Stuff