This is a rant – a knee-jerk gut reaction to hearing the New Zealand government’s latest campaign to boost economic growth via tourism. For a modest $500,000, we are trying to get more Aussies to visit our precious land, on a campaign slogan of ‘Everyone must go’.
It sounds like something that the current United States
leader would use to describe his new policy of mass deportations of illegal immigrants,
or – closer to home, and to the bone – Australia’s ‘section 501’ deportations of
non-citizens who don’t live up to their character test: half of them being New
Zealanders.
Don’t get me wrong – I’m not against Aussie visitors, just angry about how blinkered vision can see increased tourism and more overseas dollars as (part of) the answer for our economic problems. Our worst economic problems are inequality and lack of access to the basics for so many, on both sides of the Tasman Divide. It is not about increasing the size of the pie.
In a world wracked by climate change and economic disparity - globally and in each of these countries, more tourism is not the way to go. We still haven’t learnt our lessons from the COVID pandemic – that a disease spread by invisible viruses could impact almost the entire human population so quickly through air travel, and hit the poor the hardest.
In the rush to get more Aussies over here with a dodgy tag line, we may get more than we bargained for, as alluded to in this brilliant take-off of an earlier New Zealand tourism campaign (100% Pure), in one of two mock ad pitches for an invasion of New Zealand by Australia. Here’s “The New Zealand Invasion (100% There for taking)” (again).
