It’s Wednesday. Four items today, and three of them come down to who pays for tourism once the visitors have left. Here’s what’s moving.
The Mackenzie is adding charges at five more public toilets, because charging at only three didn’t work
Mackenzie District Council voted yesterday to bring in user-pays at five more public toilets: Fairlie’s Main Street, Burkes Pass, Lakeside Drive in Tekapo, Twizel’s main block, and a pilot at Lake Pūkaki on Meridian Energy land. The plan also brings QR-code donation points to other public facilities and freedom campgrounds. The district has charged at three toilets since mid-2025, at $1.50 by card or $2 in coins, and the lesson from those three is what drove the decision. RNZ reports that visitors avoided them. They queued at the free blocks, filled up cafes without buying anything, and in some cases went behind the paid block rather than pay for it. Mayor Scott Aronsen said cleaners who came three times a day found the free toilets needing another clean within half an hour.
The numbers explain why a small rural council is taking this on. Its toilets have about 900,000 users a year and cost about $800,000 to run, roughly 4 percent of total rates, against $80,000 in revenue. MBIE has put in $2.5 million for the new payment systems, donation devices and upgrades, and the council wants them working before the summer peak.
The broader point is that user-pays at one stop just moves people to the next free one, so a charge only works when it covers a whole route. That is why the Mackenzie is doing it district-wide rather than one site at a time. Under National’s election plan to share the International Visitor Levy with councils from July 2027, based on international guest nights, a district this dependent on overnight visitors would get a share. The toilet charges do not wait for that.
Stat of the day
10%
The share of the Mackenzie's $800,000 annual toilet bill covered by the $80,000 its paid toilets bring in, across about 900,000 visits a year. (1News)
Source: 1News, RNZ, Mackenzie District Council via Scoop
Sand Safaris’ liquidators expect little back from about $2 million of debt, including a Covid tourism loan
KPMG’s first liquidators’ report on Sand Safaris 2014 Ltd, the Far North company behind the Dune Rider tours on Ninety Mile Beach, puts its debts at about $2 million against assets estimated at $6,800. The NZ Herald reports that the liquidators describe the chance of any return to unsecured creditors as very slim. The company was put into liquidation on 24 August on an application from Inland Revenue. A linked company with the same director, Ruapehu Mountain Transport, which ran ski field shuttles on Mt Ruapehu, went into voluntary administration on 21 August.
The creditor worth noticing is the Crown. Crown Regional Holdings, which manages MBIE’s regional investments, is owed $469,000 from a $490,000 loan made in 2021 under the Strategic Tourism Assets Protection Programme. That was the Covid scheme meant to keep “strategic” tourism businesses alive through the border closure, and this loan was meant to keep the purpose-built beach vehicles and the winter Ruapehu service running. The Herald reports that by the end the company was mostly running school transport contracts for the Ministry of Education. Loans from the Covid era are still coming due, and this is a reminder that some of the businesses they carried through never recovered the trade they were supposed to protect.
Source: NZ Herald, NZ Herald, 3 September
Canterbury ratepayers will cover Kaikōura’s flood repairs after MBIE declined to fund them
Environment Canterbury has confirmed a $5.09 million local share of flood recovery and resilience works in Kaikōura, debt-funded and recovered through rates over the next two years. The July flood dropped more than 450mm of rain and washed millions of cubic metres of gravel down the Kowhai River, raising its bed by five to seven metres in places. The overall repair bill is estimated at $33 million. RNZ reports that MBIE told the council it could not fund a 60 percent share of the anticipated $12.73 million repair bill the council had expected, and the Regional Infrastructure Fund has put in $900,000. ECan has also asked the National Emergency Management Agency for help. Chair Deon Swiggs said the government “hasn’t come to the party”.
Kaikōura is a small ratepayer base carrying a large visitor load: a State Highway 1 stop, a whale-watching and cruise port, and a town hit by road closures in July. It is the same problem the Mackenzie is dealing with, only bigger. Under National’s levy plan Kaikōura’s share would be $835,000, aimed at cruise arrivals and public spaces. That would help, but it is small next to a $33 million flood bill.
Immigration New Zealand’s new system approved 32 visitor visas that no officer had looked at
RNZ reports that faults in ADEPT, the processing platform at the centre of Immigration New Zealand’s $336 million Our Future Services programme, allowed 32 visitor visas and 23 job checks to be approved with no officer assessment. The same faults meant 364 parents and grandparents applying for visas were not asked for the required TB screening, and 295 of them were granted visas anyway. INZ said automated steps running more than once let applications move past manual assessment before it was done, and that the faults have since been fixed.
The programme is already under review after its predicted benefits were found to be overstated by $134 million, and Cabinet has asked MBIE for a new business case by April 2027. For the visitor economy the visa system is part of the product, since for markets outside the visa-waiver list it decides whether a trip happens at all. The report lands a week before INZ closes its old visitor visa application forms on 8 October. That is a good time for agents handling visa-required markets to check how their clients’ applications are moving through.
Source: RNZ, Immigration New Zealand
Coming up
- 1 October: Parliament is dissolved, with writ day on 4 October
- 8 October: The old visitor visa application forms close and remaining drafts are deleted
- 12 October: Community drop-in on the proposed sale of Napier’s Kennedy Park Resort
- 25 October: Air New Zealand’s expanded Hobart to Auckland season starts
- 28 October: Reserve Bank OCR decision, and Air New Zealand’s first Christchurch to Singapore service
- 4 November: Tourism Summit Aotearoa and the NZ Tourism Awards, Te Pae Christchurch
- 7 November: General election
- Early November: Feedback closes on Nelson’s draft waterfront masterplan
That's today's briefing. The Shoulder Season is back every weekday morning.