I never thought I would be saying this but New Zealand needs to charge tourists for access to our national parks.
After a generation of chronic underfunding, the Department of Conservation (Doc) is facing crises all over the country.
There isn’t enough money to empty toilets by helicopter from Mueller Hut in Mount Cook National Park, a hut used mostly by tourists; three key bridges have been closed in Mount Aspiring National Park due to tourists ignoring bridge limits and are now awaiting replacement with bigger structures; and the track to one of Coromandel’s prime destinations, Cathedral Cove, is indefinitely closed awaiting funds for repair.
Every region is facing problems with failing tourism infrastructure even though tourism is our second-largest source of overseas funds.
Recently announced cuts to Doc funding will just make things worse.
The demands of the tourism industry are subverting Doc’s primary role, conservation of our plants and animals, to a predominantly tourism and recreational role. Where once biodiversity rangers fought to save species, now many rangers are busy mowing campsites, keeping tracks tidy and cleaning toilets.
Increasingly, conservation work is being undertaken by volunteer groups who have sprung up around the country to try to fill the slack.
It stems from a deliberate policy back in the Key government era, to offload the lion’s share of conservation work on to the community, the people who care enough to do the hard yards. And they are hard.
I belong to the Central Otago Lakes branch of Forest and Bird and together with 80 other volunteers service 21 traplines and grids with 1400 traps and 700 bait stations in the Makarora Valley, in part of Mount Aspiring National Park.
Several conservation partner groups including Southern Lakes Sanctuary, do similar work in Matukituki, Dart and Rees Valleys.
But volunteers can only do so much. We need paid workers for some of the tasks that are too demanding for our predominantly retired volunteers: track maintenance, installing and maintaining traps and the skilled job of monitoring predators and bird populations.
These are essential roles and provide employment in remote communities.
But funding is hard to find.
It is dispiriting going cap-in-hand to the few independent sources of funding, competing with hundreds of other worthy organisations, many tackling desperate social needs.
The lack of funds for conservation could be alleviated if Doc were allowed to charge for access at popular tourist locations.
But the money must be retained in Doc, rather than disappearing into a consolidated fund to be used by central government for building roads in other parts of the country.
Charging for access to national parks is a model used successfully in many other countries including parts of Australia and USA. A visitor’s pass to Yellowstone National Park costs $US20-$US30 and 80% of that revenue stays with the park, raising an average of $US12million a year.
As it stands in New Zealand, Doc are forced to spend millions upon millions of dollars each year on tourist facilities — huts, tracks and bridges.
And now there are even more cuts to already hard-pressed staff and funds.
Meanwhile, the very reason that tourists come here, our natural wonders, are deteriorating at an alarming rate. We are slowly watching the golden goose get eaten by stoats.
If our forests and alpine areas, rivers and islands are to stand any chance of retaining their biota and beauty we need to make conservation financially sustainable, independent of the whims of whoever is in government.
And the best way we can do that is to charge tourists for access.
■ Andrew Penniket is chairman of the Forest & Bird Central Otago Lakes branch.
