It’s Friday, and the freshest news of the week is a set of photographs taken from an aircraft over country almost nobody visits. Here’s what’s moving.
Half the tōtara and cedar in the Wilberforce is possum-damaged, and the drop window opens on 14 September
The Department of Conservation released aerial monitoring yesterday showing roughly 50 percent of vulnerable mountain tōtara and kaikawaka, the mountain cedar, damaged by possums in the Wilberforce valley in Mid Canterbury. The photography was flown last summer to measure canopy die-back across the Wilberforce and Mathias, and DOC’s assessment is that the Wilberforce forest is now in very poor condition.
The reason this rates a media release rather than a line in a monitoring report is the forest type. The upper Wilberforce and Mathias catchments hold a cedar and tōtara association that is rare nationally, and both species are highly palatable to possums. Browsing kills the canopy, stops regeneration underneath it, and the two together turn a slow decline into a collapse. National predator control programme manager Peter Morton was direct about what the photographs showed, saying “seeing so many dead trees was a wakeup call”.
DOC will run an aerial operation using biodegradable 1080 cereal baits on the first clear weather window between 14 September and 30 November, targeting possums, rats and stoats, alongside support for a community-led ground control effort.
The operational point for anyone taking guests into that country is the window rather than the drop. It is eleven weeks wide, it covers the whole of spring, and it ends a fortnight before the summer walking season gets going. Aerial operations bring caution signage at access points and dog restrictions that stay up until DOC lifts them, so if you have trips routed through the Rakaia headwaters between now and December, the thing to confirm is the caution period, not the date of the flight.
Stat of the day
About 50%
The share of vulnerable mountain tōtara and kaikawaka in the Wilberforce valley showing possum damage, measured by aerial photography last summer. (Department of Conservation)
Source: Department of Conservation · Mirage News
Fiji’s five percent tourism tax went live on Monday, and the trade got existing bookings out of it
Fiji’s Tourism Services Tax took effect on 1 September. It is five percent, it applies to hotels, restaurants, tour operators and cruise businesses turning over more than FJ$2 million a year, and the revenue is ring-fenced to support Fiji Airways, with around FJ$70 million expected.
The fight over the last fortnight was not about the rate. It was about whether a tax announced in the winter could be charged on a holiday sold in the autumn. The Travel Agents’ Association of New Zealand and its Australian counterpart both argued that the trigger has to be the date a booking is made rather than the date the service is delivered, and the Fiji Hotel and Tourism Association pushed the same line from inside the market. On 25 August the Fijian Ministry of Finance confirmed that bookings made before 1 September are not subject to the tax even where the travel happens after it. TAANZ chief executive Julie White said the decision “gives Kiwi travellers the certainty they needed”.
This matters here for two reasons. The first is volume. New Zealand sent 219,000 people to Fiji in 2025, 22.2 percent of all arrivals and second only to Australia, and September and October school holidays were exactly the bookings at risk. The second is the precedent, which cuts both ways. A destination has now put a visitor tax in place to prop up its national airline, which is a live argument in a country where regional air links are being subsidised route by route. And a set of trade bodies moved a foreign treasury off retrospective application in under a fortnight, which is worth remembering the next time an agency here says an implementation date cannot be changed.
Source: RNZ Pacific · Fijivillage · TAANZ via Scoop · Pacific Media Network
Twenty-five years of SkyCity Adelaide adds up to A$420 million of cash losses, and the buyer being named is already buying Christchurch
Forsyth Barr put numbers this week on what SkyCity’s Australian arm has cost. The broker calculates that SkyCity Adelaide has delivered about A$420 million of cumulative net cash losses across the twenty-five years since SkyCity bought it from the South Australian government for A$180 million. Getting there took more than A$730 million of investment in the precinct, including A$200 million of regulatory costs and penalties, against an estimated A$315 million of cash earnings. The broker’s view is that a sale would go down well, and it rates the company outperform.
SkyCity has already said it will begin a strategic review of Adelaide in the first half of FY27, with advisers appointed, so the note is a push on a door that is open rather than a call out of nowhere. The name Forsyth Barr attaches to the likely buyer is the part with a New Zealand address on it. Iris Capital is the most active acquirer of regional Australasian casino assets, having taken Cairns for A$193 million, and it is the party linked to Skyline Enterprises’ $102 million sale of Christchurch Casino. Handle that link carefully: Skyline’s own announcement named only an Australian purchaser, and neither Iris nor the casino has publicly confirmed the buyer.
Casinos are not tour product, but the buildings around them are. SkyCity Auckland is a convention centre, two hotels and a chunk of the city’s evening capacity, and Christchurch Casino sits inside the same conversation about who owns Ōtautahi’s visitor infrastructure. If the same Sydney buyer ends up holding Christchurch and Adelaide, the question for anyone contracting rooms or function space is who they will be dealing with in two years, not who signed the last agreement.
Source: NZ Herald · Crux on the Christchurch Casino sale
ACT costed a way to pay councils for tourism without charging anyone anything new
ACT put a price on its Local Tourism Dividend on Monday morning. The policy hands councils $1 for every guest night in their district out of existing Crown revenue, on the argument that visitors already pay tax centrally while the pressure they create lands locally. David Seymour’s framing was that tourism operators pay around $5 billion in GST, that the money should follow the beds, and that Auckland would receive about $7 million a year, which he pointed out is the figure the city has previously said it needed.
Read the $5 billion as ACT’s number rather than an audited one. The $7 million is the one to test, because it is small. A dollar a night is a rounding error against what a percentage levy on accommodation would raise, and the districts under the most visitor pressure are the ones with the fewest ratepayers to spread a shortfall across.
What it does do is complete the pre-election picture, and the picture is a three-way split. ACT and now National have ruled out a bed tax. New Zealand First’s position is that the levy signed into the Auckland regional deal remains government policy. The regional tourism organisations and the industry bodies have spent the winter asking every party to commit to accommodation levy legislation, and got a refusal from two of them. Nothing gets decided before 7 November, and whatever emerges will be a coalition compromise rather than any of the three positions as stated.
Source: ACT via Scoop · RTNZ on accommodation levy legislation
Coming up
- Monday 7 September Wairere Falls Track, carpark and toilets close completely for works
- 10-12 September Snow Machine, Coronet Peak, The Remarkables and Queenstown
- 13 September Auckland’s City Rail Link opens to passengers
- 14 September Stats NZ international travel for July 2026, and the first day of DOC’s aerial control window in the Wilberforce and Mathias
- Mid-September Tourism New Zealand’s online AI collective forum for operators
- 16 September The permanent hoiho set-net closure takes effect
- 18 September TrailLite launches the Roadcraft
- 24 September The House rises ahead of the general election
- 30 September Feedback closes on Goat Island parking pricing, and AAT Kings early-bird pricing closes on the 2027/28 season
- September Avani Queenstown opens on the Lake Wākatipu waterfront. Cabinet’s decision on essential air route funding for Originair’s Westport service is still unannounced
- October Christchurch Airport’s annual meeting and SkyCity’s annual meeting
- 18 October Cardrona’s extended closing date
- 28 October Air New Zealand’s first direct Christchurch to Singapore service
- 4 November Tourism Summit Aotearoa and the New Zealand Tourism Awards, Te Pae Christchurch
- 7 November General election
- 30 November DOC’s control window in the Wilberforce and Mathias closes, and Wairere Falls Track is due to reopen
That's today's briefing. The Shoulder Season is back every weekday morning.