Kiwis are loathe to be rude or inhospitable, we don’t like to offend (unless it’s on social media). New Zealanders are the Labradors of the world. But our chronic niceness is ruining the country.
We were once a country where our leader had the audacity to mock the smell of uranium on an American’s breath, a nation where flour bombs were dropped on rugby games to protest racial segregation in a completely different country, a population who marched and said, "Hell no".
Now we seem to be a nation of apathetic souls, limping from one long weekend to another. Take tourism. We need tourism, apparently. Hands up if any tourism money is making it into your pocket. Hands up if someone you know was killed by a tourist driver who walked off an international flight and into a 3500kg campervan they’d never driven before. Yes, this is a very pretty country and I’m not surprised people like it, but I visited the Hooker Valley track in Aoraki Mount Cook National Park recently and I saw just where all this being nice has got us.
It was impossible not to notice the used tissue paper decorating the bushes. There were hundreds and hundreds of tourists, making the 5km walk to the glacier lake an infuriatingly slow plod punctuated by bursts of irritated overtaking. The new swing bridges can only take 20 people at a time, so the queue snaked down the track, ridiculous and ghastly. When did going for a walk in New Zealand become like making your way from your seat to the aisle in a crowded theatre?
The great outdoors isn’t so great if you can’t see it. Taking a photo, you need to find an angle where there aren’t 200 ant-like figures in the foreground, all dressed in brand new outdoor wear, chucking rocks into the glacier lake.
The number of tourists rose by over a million in the last year but it’s still down 17% on pre-pandemic levels, which were out the gate.
Maybe we should take a leaf out of Spain’s book. The Spanish aren’t known for being overly polite. They are passionate and proud of their country. If annoyed, they are furious.
The Spanish have had it with tourists. Thousands of protesters marched through central Barcelona last week, waving signs saying, "Barcelona is not for sale" and "Tourists go home" and squirting holidaymakers with water guns in the latest expression of anger at high tourism numbers.
On the Canary Islands the locals are equally fed up. Tens of thousands of people took to the streets of Tenerife in April, taking part in mass demonstrations aimed at discouraging foreign holidaymakers while also compelling councils to introduce new legislation to protect the environment from the huge damage the influx of tourists is causing.
Here in New Zealand, there have been calls for a visitor levy and cap on tourism numbers since 2018, when a draft tourism strategy acknowledged that the character of some of New Zealand’s best loved places may be changing as visitor numbers rise. In 2022, when the drawbridge creaked back down, there was a growing sense that things shouldn’t go back to the way they had been. And yet nothing has changed. There’s no doubt this government is a bunch of short stay tourists and the price of lying back and taking it will be years of untangling the woeful policy they are fast tracking and reaping the ruin they are strewing - but no matter who’s been in government, we have been ignoring the toilet paper festooning our bushes for decades.
When will we have the courage to stand up for ourselves and be less than welcoming?
