Wagner Nicky: Southland District Council (Stewart Island/Rakiura Visitor Levy) Empowering Bill — Second Reading 
Wagner Nicky: Southland District Council (Stewart Island/Rakiura Visitor Levy) Empowering Bill — Second Reading 
[Volume:677;Page:717] 
NICKY WAGNER (National—Christchurch Central) 
: 
 I rise to support as does virtually everybody else in this House the Southland District Council (Stewart Island/Rakiura Visitor Levy) Empowering Bill. Of course it is a local bill brought to us by my colleague the very honourable MP for Invercargill Eric Roy. The bill is designed to address an issue specific to Stewart Island / Rakiura. It is the problem of how 400 permanent residents can provide the infrastructure needed to welcome and to look after about 40000 visitors per year to the island. 
Of course Stewart Island is very famous for its tourism. It has beautiful bush fabulous beaches fishing and a unique natural environment. It is particularly well known for its iconic birds such as the kiwi and the kakapo. I believe that in fact Stewart Island is the place you are most likely to see a kiwi in the wild. Eighty-five percent of the island is the magnificent Rakiura National Park. But to attract and entertain the tourists who visit the island the community needs to create and maintain visitor walking tracks and tourist roads and most important to provide public toilets for their guests. All these projects are capital-intensive and have ongoing maintenance costs. All these projects are difficult to fund from a small number of ratepayers. The member Eric Roy and the island community have been working on these issues and looking for solutions for many years and have finally decided that a levy is the best way to fund these costs. This bill provides the mechanism to do just that. 
Because the island can be accessed only by air or by sea the bill allows the Southland District Council on behalf of the Stewart Island / Rakiura community to collect levies from visitors directly via an approved operator. Approved operators are the people who operate the airline or the ferry companies or maybe cruise liner operators. The bill also provides mechanisms to set and review the amount of the levy and to establish a subcommittee of stakeholders to administer that levy. Their first job will be to establish the price of the levy and then to make sure that that money is spent wisely for visitors. 
 Eric Roy’s consultation with the community and with the Southland District Council was extensive. So this bill was well-thought-out before it came to the House. However the Local Government and Environment Committee spent some time considering a series of issues. The first was the definitions of “visitor” and “excluded visitor” because who should pay the levy is fundamental to the success of the bill. The final definition of a visitor agreed by the committee after we had taken considerable advice was that a visitor was one who travels to the island but is not a resident or a ratepayer or a dependant of a resident or a ratepayer or anyone who has an ownership interest in the island. An excluded visitor includes those who are under 18 or those who travel to the island as part of their job; also anyone who stayed any longer than 21 days or remained entirely within the boundaries of the Rakiura National Park. We also introduced a clause that ensures that the levy money is only used for funding activities that benefit visitors or to mitigate the effects of visitors on the island environment. That seemed pretty fair to us. Finally we recommended that any offences—in other words people who did not pay their levy—were infringement offences. We wanted to do that in order to streamline the process and to make it more cost-effective for the council. New clause 25 requires that the infringement fee be no less than $150 and cannot exceed $500. 
Stewart Island or Rakiura if you prefer is a beautiful place and it is a wonderful place to visit. I have visited Oban and further afield and I thoroughly recommend it to anybody who enjoys a natural environment a unique place and a very special place to visit. I support this bill as an intelligent solution to a problem of a very small population struggling to provide the infrastructure for over 400000 tourists and the funds to mitigate the wear and tear of those visitors on their island environment. I commend the bill to the House.