‘Worst to come’ for economy
A regional economic agency has a warning for the region: ‘‘the real economic fallout is yet to come’’.
Nelson Regional Development Agency (NRDA) boss Mark Rawson told the Nelson City Council that there was ‘‘no way to sugar coat some of the things that we are potentially going to be seeing’’.
He said of the Infometric report recently forecasting 9 to 10 per cent unemployment for the region: ‘‘to be brutally honest, we think that’s a bit light’’.
Rawson said Ministry of
Social Development numbers put both Nelson and Tasman as individual regions in the top five fastest growing regions in New Zealand for people seeking unemployment benefits, ‘‘especially for 18 to 29 year-olds in our region’’.
‘‘The reality is, from our perspective, we’re seeing two crises: the first was the health crisis, and the response as we’re all aware is progressing really well; but the second crisis is the economic crisis ... we’re not even at ground zero yet.’’
He said that ‘‘no industry’’ was immune, though Nelson and Tasman was in ‘‘two extremes’’ with heavy reliance on both primary industry, which he said was ‘‘in some cases going pretty well’’, and in the tourism or visitor sector.
‘‘If you put tourism and retail together that’s about 20 per cent of our workforce, that illustrates an extremely high risk profile for the region and a real challenge for us going forward.’’
He said based on current reports and evidence, he expected recovery for the region to take 24 to 36 months ‘‘at least, if not longer’’.
‘‘There’s almost a bit of a feeling out there at times, we get a wee bit of feedback that ‘oh we’re going back to work so it’s all over, didn’t we do well’. I would really not like to be having that conversation on the street with the number of people who are being displaced or unemployed, particularly in the next three or four months.’’
He said even a greater push for domestic tourism would be difficult to leverage for the region until there was ‘‘more sustainable air connectivity’’.
Rawson said the NRDA had written to the central government asking for more support in particular for the tourism industry, as without flight-based domestic tourism the Nelson and Tasman region had ‘‘unique’’ challenges.
‘‘Airbnb released a set of statistics which said bookings have started to come up since level 2, quite a lot; however the majority of those are within 320 kilometres of someone’s home
‘‘In reality we [Nelson and Tasman] have a potential drive market of 80,000 people over-andabove our locals, whereas in the North Island, you know, that’s more usually sitting in the million to 2 million range, give or take.’’