Mike's Minute: The tourist levy doesn't improve our plight

The Mike Hosking Breakfast

There are a number of things that stand out to me post-Covid that are disappointing.

Obviously the recessionary state this place has been in and the carnage it has caused, and continues to cause, although they are all ultimately tied to the one major event.

But tourism stands out as the most clear example of something we had and something we have now lost.

Not literally. They still arrive, but not like they used to and not even close. Something happened between closing the borders and opening them back up.

Initially it was a time thing and, apparently, it was a capacity thing because the planes weren't back yet.

But four years on, what some of us saw a couple of years ago everyone now sees, and the truth has been laid bare.

We are simply not up to it the way we once were. Bits are, like Queenstown and the general area, back plus some, and that’s awesome. But nowhere else is.

We are marooned at about 80% and that doesn’t count the gap between the 80% and the 100%+ it could have been, should have been, and all those tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of people who should have been arriving in these past few years. They went elsewhere.

Let's be blunt - it's not like the world hasn’t been travelling, they're just not travelling here.

Enter the new entry fee to the country. It triples and it'll be $100. Industry operators don’t like it, and I don't blame them.

Doing it tough is hard enough without heaping more cost on, but I assume the Government took that into account.

They defend it by comparing us to the fees of other countries. But isn't that the point? We aren't other countries and the numbers show it.

I still want to argue $100 should not be a barrier. If you spent three grand getting here, is $100 what tips you over?

But here is the inescapable truth - tourism, along with dairy, was the golden goose. And if we didn't wreck it, we irreparably harmed it.

I don’t see how making it more expensive improves our plight.

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