On Why Big Spenders Are Not Our Tourism Salvation

Covid and climate change have been changing the face of tourism. That’s why it seemed oddly premature last week for Tourism Minister Stuart to announce that New Zealand isn’t interested in mass tourism any more, or in attracting the sort of budget visitors who “travel around our country on $10 a day eating two-minute noodles.” Instead, New Zealand aims to focus its marketing efforts on attracting wealthy, big spending tourists. “In terms of targeting our marketing spin,” Nash said, “it is unashamedly going to be at … High-quality tourists.”

Really? The comments have raised a few eyebrows overseas, and a few hackles here at home. Nash’s comments have also been something of a gift to an Opposition adept at portraying the Ardern government as a bunch of liberal elitists out of touch with ordinary people, and with the needs of small firms doing it tough. Surely, at this point in the pandemic, New Zealand should be feeling pretty grateful for whatever forms of tourism wash up here. For the foreseeable, it seems unlikely that we will be experiencing mass overcrowding at our prime tourism spots, and having unsustainable pressure placed on our tourism infrastructure.

After all… The “Covid Zero” lockdowns ordered by Beijing have curtailed the package tours from China, and the cruise ship industry has only just begun creaking back to life in this part of the world. For the next few years, the fear of catching Covid in foreign places also appears likely to dampen some enthusiasm for taking holidays very far away from home. Increasingly, New Zealand’s distance from key markets seems likely to become something of a deterrent on climate change grounds as well.

On that point, Nash’s comments about wishing to encourage big spenders to fly in for brief stays in elite locations sounded tone deaf to the climate change implications. The marketing focus being touted would also risk funnelling tourism’s economic benefits into a relatively small number of pricier resorts - some of which are owned by investors offshore, including the occasional Russian oligarch.

In the process, the benefits from tourism would no longer be spread quite as widely through the regions, which is where those despised budget travellers tend to spend most of their money, week in, month out. Some of those travellers also pick fruit, work on farms and wait on the tables in our cafes and restaurants. Arguably, the cumulative spend by budget tourists on food, public transport, rental vans and homestays probably rivals the spending by the high rollers on their fine dining, luxury accommodation, and hunting excursions.

That brings up the wider problem with Nash’s commentary. It felt at odds with how most New Zealanders regard our natural environment. This may be where you can find the last vestiges of the egalitarian impulses that once used to run right through our entire social fabric. Most of us don’t think we own our natural heritage, and can’t believe our luck that it is so relatively close at hand. This feeling comes with an impulse to want to share that good fortune with people from other places and yes, to maybe make some money on the side from hosting them.

But what most of us really don’t want to do is to turn this country’s natural wonders into playthings reserved for the richest people on the planet, while we labour away in their service – cooking their meals, making their beds, and being their faithful Sherpas into the outback. Budget travellers, by contrast, tend to be the kind of people we can easily imagine standing alongside, as we all marvel at the stunning landscapes right in front of us.

Stuart Nash needs to take note. Basically, we want to be the joint caretakers of New Zealand’s natural heritage, not the gamekeepers for the master at the lodge.

Footnote One: Solid supportive evidence for this POV could be found last week in the Guardian, with Otago University tourism professor James Higham putting it in a nutshell:

“Big spenders are often the most environmentally damaging, and because they tend to have … regular repeat high carbon travel with low length of stay … they’re not particularly beneficial, particularly to far flung destinations made in New Zealand.” Tourists who tend to be on a lower income – such as international students and backpackers – often stayed for longer in the country, and length of stay was directly correlated with cumulative in-country spending, [Higham] said.

Footnote Two: The Noah Baumbach film of Don DeLillo’s novel White Noise (with Greta Gerwig and Adam Driver) is about to be released. With typical crankiness, DeLillo once described tourism (in his earlier novel The Names) as “the march of stupidity.” As in:

“To be a tourist is to escape accountability. Errors and failings don't cling to you the way they do back home. You're able to drift across continents and languages, suspending the operation of sound thought. Tourism is the march of stupidity. You're expected to be stupid. The entire mechanism of the host country is geared to travellers acting stupidly. You walk around dazed, squinting into fold-out maps. You don't know how to talk to people, how to get anywhere, what the money means, what time it is, what to eat or how to eat it. Being stupid is the pattern, the level and the norm. You can exist on this level for weeks and months without reprimand or dire consequence. Together with thousands, you are granted immunities and broad freedoms. You are an army of fools, wearing bright polyesters, riding camels, taking pictures of each other, haggard, dysentric, thirsty. There is nothing to think about but the next shapeless event.”

Got it. Tourists are dumb. And, as the Onion once pointed out, so are babies.

Sorry, 50 years late

So the Motion Picture Academy plans to apologise to Sacheen Littlefeather for the abuse she received when – on Marlon Brando’s behalf - she declined the acting Oscar that Brando had just been awarded for The Godfather. When Littlefeather told the Oscar crowd that Brando’s reason was the industry’s treatment of Native Americans, the explanation was met with scattered applause and a chorus of boos. Supposedly, an enraged John Wayne had to be restrained from attacking Littlefeather.

Littlefeather’s response to the belated apology has been as dignified as her speech on that night, long ago. While noting with amusement that it has taken the Academy 50 years to acknowledge the point she and Brando were making, Littlefeather noted that patience is what has enabled Native Americans to survive the wrongs still being done to them.

Wayne’s behaviour on the night held a special irony. In the 1956 movie The Searchers he had given the greatest acting performance of his career as Ethan Edwards, an embittered racist bent on revenge. Years ago in this essay in Werewolf, I did my best to untangle some of the narrative threads of this peculiar film, and trace its influence on a generation of American filmmakers, including Martin Scorsese and George Lucas.

The film portrays the attempt by Edwards and a man called Martin Pawley(played by Jeffrey Hunter) to hunt down a Comanche warrior band led by Chief Scar, Ethan’s moral double. In a raid, Scar has killed his brother’s family after raping Edwards unrequited true love, his sister in law, Martha. Scar also kidnaps Edwards’ niece Debbie, and makes her as his concubine. It is unclear throughout whether Edwards aims to rescue Debbie, or kill her for being defiled. Simmering away beneath the Western action, is a disturbing portrayal of racism, and its roots in patriarchal sexual jealousy.

Like several other classics from the same era (Vertigo, Kiss Me Deadly, the Douglas Sirk melodramas) The Searchers is also a wildly uneven film. The absurd plots and the often uneven pacing of these 1950s films is part of what makes them such fever dreams of repression and obsession. For example: the “humorous” bits that director John Ford used to lighten the oppressive main story are uniformly awful - and in one case – wildly racist in themselves. As I said in the Werewolf essay:

As if alarmed by the disturbing content, Ford threw in what he clearly hoped were several episodes of comic relief. Without exception, the comic interludes are utterly terrible. The list of shame includes the Shakespearean halfwit played by Hank Worden, the yokel played by Ken Curtis and a Swedish neighbour who seems to have wandered in from an Elmer Fudd cartoon.

Worst of all is the ‘comical’ subplot involving a marriage-by –mistake between Jeffrey Hunter and an Indian squaw who is mocked and kicked down a hill (a) because she’s an Indian (b) because she’s a woman and (c) because she’s fat and unattractive. (She finally gets slaughtered in a massacre.) As film critic Roger Ebert once wrote : “Those who value The Searchers filter [the comic relief] out, patiently waiting for a return to the main story line.”

So… Even in one of its greatest films, Hollywood has a lot of apologise for to Native Americans.

Footnote:

As for Native American film-making… I recommend the 1961 film The Exiles, a drama that feels like a documentary. It traces 24 hours in the lives of a group of uprooted Native Americans, as they make a go of their lives in the middle of Los Angeles. (Good music soundtrack of early 1960s rock instrumentals too.) Accidentally, The Exiles also captured the last days of Bunker Hill, the lower class residential community close to the city centre that got bulldozed by developers and turned into a concrete moonscape. Bunker Hill had also been the location for much of the action in the noir classic Kiss Me Deadly.

Here’s the trailer for The Exiles:

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