Cut visits, earn more

Hooray, we’re getting direct flights between Los Angeles and Christchurch. The headline says this will ‘‘turbocharge’’ New Zealand’s tourism economy. I’ve spent a few hours of this lifetime tinkering with engines – not as many as I’d like, but more than my wife’s happy with – and I’d suggest bolting a turbocharger onto the current engine might not be the most forward-thinking approach. It seems to me that turbocharging is more about horsepower than about achieving a sustainable or economically sensible form of power.

Now I know some Noel-know-it-all will get in the comments and tell me turbocharging can actually improve fuel efficiency, but I’m yet to come across a gearhead who told me they were installing a turbo to get better gas mileage.

In my experience cars with turbochargers installed tend to go like the clappers and be a heck of a lot of fun for a while before you have too much fun and – bang – catastrophe. So we’ve taken an economy that was going ok, idling along, probably running a bit rich, but still running. Now we’re gonna bang on a turbocharger and wonder what happened when it ends in tears.

For the life of me I can’t understand how we reconcile tourism with our desire to be forward-acting on climate change. We fly ‘em in, rent them a dirty old van, send them about the country to burn more fuel while they clog the roads and overflow the freedom camping spots. Then we stand back and lecture the world about how pure and green we are.

Maybe we should be aiming to have fewer tourists, and have them each spend a lot more money? Been to Queenstown in peak season lately? It’s bursting at the seams and I can tell you it’s not a pleasant experience for tourists or locals.

Been to any really big tourist attractions overseas in the last few years? If you ever needed a reminder there are now seven billion souls wandering about on this planet, standing in line with a billion of them to see some crappy old church is a great reminder.

If we invite too many, we’ll eventually get the really bad tourists, the equivalent of English football fans on a stag do in Amsterdam. Remember that particularly gross tourist family last summer? Expect

to see more like that.

But we continue to fly ‘em in. For what? So they can see clean and green New Zealand before climate change runs rampant? Talk about chartering a boat to go out and watch the Titanic sink.

It seems to me this being green business is more about marketing than reality. We’re selling the family silverware.

If we’re gonna have a party and watch the planet burn, let’s be honest that this is what we’re doing. And make it a hell of a party. But if we’re going to be serious about the environment, let’s get real and accept that anyone getting here on a plane has a negative environmental impact.

Instead of turbocharging this old pig of an engine, we need to have a good hard look at how we’re making our dirty dollars. Then we need to think about removing the engine and replacing it with a fully electric power plant.

Or, god forbid, we might need to teach tourists to walk on their own feet for a few kilometres and entirely avoid a trip in a beat-up old turbocharged Skyline.