Call for Nash to set a date
Southern tourism bosses say they desperately need a date for when the trans-Tasman travel bubble will be a reality, so they can attempt to keep their businesses going.
Tourism Minister Stuart Nash will be in Southland tomorrow, and business leaders say they need a date and information about when borders might reopen.
However, Nash yesterday said he had been upfront that massscale international tourism was unlikely before 2022, and the Government was working hard to open a trans-Tasman bubble.
‘‘We have never stopped working on the issue of the transTasman bubble,’’ he said, but community cases in both New Zealand and Australia had slowed things down.
Mass vaccination would be crucial to the tourism and wider economies, and the Government was on track to immunising all Kiwis by the end of 2021, Nash said.
However, Southland district deputy mayor Ebel Kremer said: ‘‘We’re in this huge vacuum of a lack of information.’’
A small group of business owners, representing a crosssection of Fiordland’s economy, had been invited to meet Nash, Kremer said. He worried that if businesses were forced to close, there would be no community to welcome visitors when they eventually returned. Kremer said 11 Fiordland businesses had closed because of Covid-19.
Queenstown Lakes District Council mayor Jim Boult said a clear date for a trans-Tasman bubble would give operators space to make arrangements to defer payments like loans.
Boult understood that the Government was wary of providing a specific date in fear of future outbreaks, but New Zealand and Australia had demonstrated their ability to manage these, he said.
‘‘It’s time to put a date on the table.’’
Fiordland Jet co-owner Chris Adams is part of a group of operators who collectively sought legal advice about how funding decisions for the Government’s strategic assets protection programme were made.
He said it was frustrating to see the Government spending money on things like firearm buyback schemes when tourism businesses were hurting.
‘‘I want to know his [Nash’s] plan for the future of tourism,’’ Adams said.
Nash was visiting to hear from ‘‘mayors and councillors, small businesses, employers, community organisations and iwi’’ about the border closure.
He would also receive updates on the roll-out of tourism support and infrastructure investment from the Tourism Recovery Package, Provincial Growth Fund and other sources, he said.