The heading was ensuring New Zealand benefits from sustainable tourism growth.
Tourism and sustainability in the same sentence, you’re joking.
Davis and Sage were effusive.
“Tourism is a vital part of NZ’s ongoing success, supporting national and regional economies, creating jobs and allowing us to celebrate who we are.”
How, they don’t say.
The strategy has five broad themes. They are the economy, the environment, international and domestic visitors, New Zealanders and our communities and, finally, regions.
That was all huff and puffery to me.
Starting with the economy, tourism is a low wage industry with many people massively exploited.
If we ever want to even approach the ideal of wage parity with Australia we won’t do it with tourism.
Then there’s the environment where, we are told, tourism is sustainable.
For a start one would respectfully ask, how?
The carbon dioxide emissions from international air travel far exceed NZ’s total emissions. Aviation contributes 2.5% of total world carbon emissions and is picked to rise to 22% by 2050, making a complete farce of any zero carbon aim.
According to the MyClimate calculator just one person flying from Beijing to Auckland return is responsible for the emission of four tonnes of carbon.
For politicians flying business class the figure is three times that of cattle class.
Putting the Beijing-Auckland return flight into perspective, it is equal to half the total carbon emissions from a Californian living in Orange County and our politicians flying business class is equal to nearly twice that amount.
And they have the gall to tell us to cut methane emissions.
It has been reported nothing we do causes greater or most easily avoidable harm to the environment than flying, which more often than not is optional or merely recreational.
Our Government wants to increase that harm by encouraging tourists?
It makes burping cows quite insignificant in the overall scheme of things.
Late last year Air NZ effusively told us it had flown 30 billion kilometres but had offset close to 27,000 tonnes of carbon last year, mainly through forests.
This further questions the Government’s position on methane because farmers can’t mitigate their own emissions.
What’s Air NZ got that provincial NZ hasn’t.
Why can corporates take out large tracts of productive farmland land to plant trees and mitigate their carbon emissions?
Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment Simon Upton said pines won’t mitigate carbon dioxide, yet once that land is taken out of food production it is gone forever.
Last year we were told our international aviation emissions in 2016 were 3.4m tonnes of carbon dioxide, up 152% from 1990, making methane emissions insignificant by comparison.
Moving on from air travel, how are all these tourists travelling the country?
There’s freedom campers in cheap and cheerful wagons that one could respectfully suggest aren’t state of the art when it comes to fuel efficiency.
Then there are all the big camper vans on the road, many holding up productive traffic while belching carbon dioxide by the bucketful.
Others will hire cars and some will go in buses.
In addition, we have cruise ships hugely polluting the sea and the atmosphere with estimates one cruise ship can emit the same amount of particulate matter a day as a million cars.
I reiterate my position that tourism is not environmentally sustainable and should not enjoy the highly privileged position it holds in the economy, certainly at the expense of food production.
One plank of the Davis-Sage statement was tourism’s contribution to the regions.
Researching that contribution isn’t difficult.
In February this year tourists dumped vast amounts of rubbish by our iconic Lake Waikaremoana. The lake’s trustees were astonished at the dumping and vandalism at the lake this summer.
Central Otago was a favourite place of mine for travelling and fishing. That was until recently when the excessive detritus of human excrement and paper made lakeside walking hazardous.
In Queenstown 485 infringements for freedom camping were issued in the short period between December 21 and January 8.
Freedom campers have, in addition to other misdemeanours, forged self-contained stickers on their vehicles even though they don’t have a toilet.
What that inevitably means is they relieve themselves at will.
What we have in NZ is one sector of the economy, tourism, getting considerable support from politicians and political parties. The industry is allowed to pollute at whim without incurring the wrath of Fish and Game or Greenpeace.
We then have ridiculous statements that we’re going to have sustainable tourism.
An oxymoron surely.
