It’s Monday, and a consultation that will shape how 1,600 tourism businesses get their permission to operate closes at the end of it. Here’s what’s moving.
The first National Conservation Policy Statement takes its last submissions today
Submissions close today on the Department of Conservation’s proposals for the first National Conservation Policy Statement, the document that will sit above the conservation management strategies, plans and general policies currently governing what happens on public conservation land. The consultation opened on 14 May, was due to close on 9 July, and was extended to today. It covers three things: the proposed policies themselves, what goes into the new area plans that will replace the existing stack of documents, and which activities become pre-approved or exempt.
That third piece is the one with commercial consequences. The reform package puts guided walking, biking, water taxis, drone use and small-scale filming into categories that are pre-assessed against land classification and visitor zone rather than worked up from scratch each time, which the Department expects will take 30 to 40 per cent of applications out of individual processing. If you have ever waited on a concession decision while a season went past, that is the number that matters. Where the argument sits is whether pre-approval by zone can actually carry the weight being put on it, and area plans are how the zones get drawn.
The caveat is that the ground is still moving. The NCPS gets its statutory basis from the Conservation Amendment Bill, which is with the Environment Committee and does not report back until 11 November, and the Department says plainly that the scope of the first NCPS may change depending on what happens to the Bill. So this is a submission on a document whose enabling legislation is not settled, which is an awkward thing to write and an easy thing to skip. Skipping it means the area plans get drawn without you in the room.
Source: Department of Conservation consultation · DOC media release, 7 May · Conservation Amendment Bill, NZ Parliament
Stat of the day
$5.3 billion
What tourism on conservation land is worth each year, across more than 1,600 businesses operating on or around the conservation estate. (Department of Conservation)
The cruise sector meets on Thursday, and the deployment problem has not moved
The New Zealand Cruise Association holds its annual conference on Thursday at Shed 10 on Queens Wharf, under the title “From No Zealand to New Zealand”. Tourism and Hospitality Minister Louise Upston and Associate Transport Minister James Meager are both on the programme, alongside Auckland mayor Wayne Brown, Tourism New Zealand chief executive René de Monchy, and executives from Royal Caribbean, Princess, Carnival and Ponant. That guest list is the story. The people who decide where ships go next are in a room in Auckland for a day.
They arrive with the numbers unimproved. Preliminary deployment data reported by Newstalk ZB in May had the 2026/27 season running about three per cent below the current one, which itself came in around 250 port visits down. The regional split is the part worth reading twice: the North Island loses 41 calls, with Wellington down 17 and Napier down 12, while the South Island picks up 23. Association chief executive Jacqui Lloyd’s framing was that the numbers are starting to plateau, which is true and is also a long way from recovery.
The causes are not mysterious and have been named by the association for two years now: biofouling compliance, and cost increases from central government, agencies, ports and regional councils that compound into New Zealand being an expensive call to make. None of that is fixed by a conference. What a conference can do is give the ports and the regional operators a straight answer on what would actually change a deployment decision, which is more useful than another season of telling each other the ships will come back.
Source: New Zealand Cruise Association · Hospitality Business · Newstalk ZB
Porirua’s adventure park has a Canadian majority investor and until December to land it
Porirua City Council voted on Thursday to extend the agreement to lease for the Porirua Adventure Park on Te Rāhui o Rangituhi / Colonial Knob out to 31 December 2026. The extension exists for one reason: Ridge North America, a Canadian tourism developer with suspension bridge, gondola and rafting operations in British Columbia, has agreed to put in an undisclosed amount of capital and become the majority investor, and that needs Overseas Investment Office clearance before anything else happens.
The proposal on the table now drops the earlier staged opening in favour of a single one. Designs are due to be finalised in October, construction would start in November or December and run for about a year, and the park would open in February 2028 with a gondola, a summit restaurant, a dual zipline, mountain biking and an indoor surf simulator. A MartinJenkins assessment put the build at 43 full-time jobs and $12 million of local GDP, and the operating park at 87 jobs and $12.8 million a year, with $500,000 to $800,000 of annual rent to the council.
Read it with the history attached. This project has been nine years and close to $1 million of council money in consenting, legal reviews and assessments, an earlier council rejected an investment in it as high risk, and the developers still owe more than $209,000 in consent fees. A gondola on a hill 20 minutes north of Wellington is a genuinely good idea for a region short of built attractions. It has also been a genuinely good idea for nine years, and the OIO decision is the first thing in a while that would make it a real one.
Source: 1News · Scoop · Wellington.Scoop
A second round of zero-interest charger loans opens, and the regions are the test
The request for proposals for the second round of the government’s public EV charging loans goes out today, with around $21 million available through National Infrastructure Funding and Financing. The terms are zero interest, up to half of eligible capital costs, and up to twelve years to repay. The first round, contracted in March, put $52.7 million into 2,574 charge points with ChargeNet and Meridian, and the target behind both rounds is 10,000 public chargers by 2030 at roughly one for every 40 electric vehicles.
Energy Minister Simeon Brown described the concessionary structure as a way past the problem that charging has to be built before the demand for it exists. That framing is exactly right, and it is more true in the visitor economy than anywhere else. A rental EV on a two-week South Island loop generates charging demand in places that have no resident EV fleet to justify a charger on commercial terms, which is why the road-trip product either works or does not depending on decisions made in an RFP most operators will never read.
So it is worth reading. Round one, at two and a half times the size, went to two established networks, and whether round two reaches the thin sections of the map, the West Coast, inland Otago, the Far North, the Catlins, is what determines whether an EV itinerary is something an operator can sell with a straight face or something that comes with a range warning.
Source: Beehive · National Infrastructure Funding and Financing
Warbirds Over Wānaka is the public’s favourite event for the third time
Warbirds Over Wānaka took New Zealand’s Favourite Event at the New Zealand Event Awards on Wednesday, the third time the public vote has gone its way after 2018 and 2024. It did it in a year that went wrong in most of the ways an airshow can: conflict in the Middle East pulled out both the F-22 Raptor demonstration team and the Royal New Zealand Air Force, and the weather over Easter was cold and damp. The show still drew more than 60,000 people across three days, welcomed its millionth visitor since it began, and returned more than $57 million to the regional economy, up about 40 per cent on 2024.
The number worth sitting with is the $57 million, because it went up while the headline attractions went away. A three-day event in a town of Wānaka’s size fills every bed for a wide radius and does it in April, which is the part of the calendar every operator in the lower South Island would pay to fix. Whatever the aircraft are doing, that is the product.
General manager Ed Taylor has stepped down after 14 years and says he will be back as a volunteer, which tells you something about what the event actually runs on.
Source: Otago Daily Times · Scoop · New Zealand Events Association
Coming up
- Today Submissions close on the proposed National Conservation Policy Statement
- 11-12 August AHICE Aotearoa, Te Pae Christchurch
- 13 August New Zealand Cruise Association conference, Shed 10, Auckland
- 21-22 August Beervana, Wellington
- 24 August Group, tour escort and ADS FIT visa applications move to enhanced Immigration Online
- 25 August Tourism Holdings audited FY26 results
- 27 August West Coast Tourism Summit, Greymouth
- 28 August Air New Zealand FY26 annual results, and July Monthly Regional Tourism Estimates on the revised basis
- 31 August The new runway end safety area rule takes effect
- 11 November The Environment Committee reports back on the Conservation Amendment Bill
That's today's briefing. The Shoulder Season is back every weekday morning.