Dunedin is standing at a crossroads as it seeks to deal with a logjam of freedom campers.
The city is heading towards banning vehicles without toilets from camping overnight. A proposed bylaw is set to go before the city council in the next couple of months.
The move would bring the city into line with most of the councils that surround it, as New Zealand grapples with a massive upsurge of campers.
At the Dunedin City Council’s freedom camping site in Warrington, 11,593 vehicles — a volunteer counted each one at 6.30am each day — stayed overnight between October 1 last year and April 30.
Assuming two in each vehicle, that amounts to 23,186 people in the township over seven months.
The influx mirrors the situation nationally and internationally.
The United Nations World Tourism Organisation reported recently destinations worldwide received 369million international tourists in the first four months of the year, 21million more than the same period last year.
Chronic overcrowding in European hotspots has caused an angry backlash from locals.
In New Zealand, once almost empty wilderness sites now have the foot traffic of George St on a busy day.
At a hearing into the bylaw last month, one man described freedom campers as "a cancerous canker".
The bylaw committee recommended an option requiring non-self-contained vehicles to use campgrounds, backpackers or similar when staying overnight.
But the committee was split two to one. Cr David Benson-Pope opposed the idea, but Crs Christine Garey and Andrew Whiley supported it.
Cr Benson-Pope argued the plan would force campers "underground", away from places with facilities, meaning a return to a situation where they went to the toilet where they could.The council debate on the proposal should be interesting, given the variety of views expressed in the past.
It will occur against a background of community support for the idea of a ban: of 250 public submissions , 74% support one.
The Queenstown Lakes District, Waitaki District and Christchurch City Councils have similar bylaws.
The National Party this week announced a policy restricting non-self-contained vehicles to areas within 20m of toilet facilities.
But Waikouaiti Coast Community Board member Alasdair Morrison has argued passionately a ban is not the way to go.
The Warrington freedom camping site is in the board’s patch, and Mr Morrison says after facility upgrades and other changes there, the site is working well.
In his submission, he asked how many of the complaints the council had received about Warrington were from people who had had a direct negative experience with campers.
"How many complaints are spurious ones generated by negative information in the media?"
He had visited camping grounds in the city and had been told they did not have the capacity to take the numbers that would be displaced by a ban.
But Aaron Lodge Top 10 Holiday Park owner Lindsay McLeod said holiday camps had plenty of capacity, and even on the busiest days he was able to fit people in.
His views were backed up by Holiday Parks Association of New Zealand chief executive Fergus Brown, who was in the city this week at an HPANZ conference.
He said nationally, holiday parks were running at a capacity of just 20%.
Holiday parks had "plenty of space" and would "most definitely" welcome freedom campers, he said.
But Tourism Industry Aotearoa chief executive Chris Roberts, also at the HPANZ conference this week, said he was wary of a total ban.
"That can have unintended consequences. If a council has not allowed anywhere, they are probably still going to go ahead and do it in breach of the bylaw."
Mr Roberts also said freedom campers could be big spenders, and were inclined to return when they were older and more inclined to spend money.
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Comments
Issue has been banging around the traps for years, with no truly long-term, sustainable solutions ever having been delivered.
An immutable fact about the crowd of concern is: they do not want to pay anything for their accommodation experience, given they've already paid for the roof over their heads (their mini-vans, or similar). They are travelling as economically as they can, to maximise their dollar stretch. So, they do not represent a viable economic market to market to, for anyone involved in the accommodation sector.
I challenge Mr. Robert's claim they "could be big spenders, and were inclined to return when they were older..." I doubt a shred of objective evidence exists to support that stance - however, it is a comforting opinion.
Finally, in my experience everybody who supports freedom camping - in so much as when it occurs in circumstances where anybody with a grain of sense would suggest it needs to be tightly controlled, such as at Warrington - never have any real skin in the game and only remain proponents of the practice as long as it's NIMBY. Always been that way, and always will.