Heather du Plessis-Allan: Grim message from Stuart Nash to tourism trade

Tourism Minister Stuart Nash with Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern. He says there will be “no international tourists in the country” this year. Photo / supplied

At least Stuart Nash was honest with tourism companies. Only a few were in the cabinet. But his dull message this week was difficult for her to hear.

This year there will be “no international tourists in the country”. Quite a few in the industry understand this in order to include Australian tourists. You understand that this does not mean a transtasman bubble this year.

That is confronting. And it’s a rare piece of honesty from a government that still mostly gets this country going.

The Prime Minister informed us for the first time that Transtasman trips would be possible until July last year. Then she told us September. Then she told us about Christmas. Then she told us about the first quarter of this year.

You might as well believe in the tooth fairy.

There are whispers that privately the Prime Minister doesn’t really want to travel to Australia until both countries may be vaccinated. If this is true, the false hope it creates is cruel. Tose in the tourism industry are desperate. They cling to the hope that sells them. The longer this takes, the more debt you could become. You deserve to be telling the truth.

That’s why Nash deserves some credit. But this is where the credit ends.

He also told the operators that he had no intention of helping them much at all. You are up to date. If you can’t survive without international (possibly Australian) tourists for at least the next 11 months, “then you will likely have some very tough conversations with your bank, your creditors, your directors and your staff”.

Nash’s reasoning is that the public doesn’t want him to spend another 11 months propping up businesses, but that excuse doesn’t hold up. Otherwise, Nash and his cabinet colleagues seem more than happy to shovel money out the door when it suits them.

They spent $ 14 billion on the wage subsidy, which has stood the test of keeping workers in employment and achieved an amazingly low unemployment rate of 4.9% last week.

On the subject of matching items

They threw $ 300 million on “strategic assets” so freely like AJ Hackett that even the Auditor-General is now investigating.

They just announced another $ 311 million for the Flexiwage package designed to solve an issue we don’t have. There seems to be little point in spending millions on reducing unemployment when we have an unemployment figure that, according to the Prime Minister, is the “envy of many countries”.

If the government is willing to spend so freely, why not spend it helping tourism companies?

It doesn’t have to be just about giving money to dying businesses. It is possible to get creative and borrow ideas from offshore, such as the UK’s Eat To Help rebate program, which gave punters 50 percent off groceries as an incentive to help restaurants in trouble to accomplish.

The alternative is miserable. Businesses in cities that rely on international tourism will simply disappear. Queenstown, Franz Josef, Fox Glacier. Some of the tourism companies say that 90 percent of their customers are usually foreigners.

Without them, the restaurants close, the hotels cannot stay open, the silly activities that kiwis would never pay for.

The workers in these restaurants, hotels and companies have no jobs. They take to the streets or leave the city. The numbers in this city are dwindling. By the time Chinese and American tourists return in 2024 – if IATA expects long-haul travel to resume properly – the cute west coast tourist town is already well on its way to becoming another patea.

Then where do these tourists eat? Where do you sleep? Once that infrastructure is gone, you can’t just click your fingers and get it back. It has taken decades for this country to build the quality spots that international tourists rave about.

If we don’t have the companies to welcome the tourists back and take their money, we may lose many times more income than it costs us to hibernate and save the existing infrastructure.

The concern is that the disappearance of the infrastructure will not bother Nash much. In November last year, in his first speech as Tourism Minister, he told operators there would be no return to business as usual before Covid and urged them to target a few rich instead of a lot with lower spending .

In November, Nash appeared to have spoken before delving into his brain. Now he seems to have meant every word.