Davis KelvinHon KELVIN DAVIS (Minister of Tourism): Thank you Mr Speaker. It gives me pleasure to rise in the second reading here. I just want to address a number of the sort of issues and the misinformation that's been propagated by the Opposition.First of all the speaker who just finished Todd McClay said there is nowhere in here that says what the fund will be spent on. He says it could be used for anything at all. He just needs to look at clause 4 which amends section 3. It says this enables a levy to be charged to fund or contribute to the funding of costs associated with conservation or tourism." That's pretty specific: "conservation or tourism". That's not "anything at all". That's exactly what this bill does.They raised some other issues. "How does it make sense to exempt Australians?" was one of the questions. Well it's really quite simple. If someone is flying from say the States and pays $1500 for a fare and they have to pay $35 extra for this visitor levy that's a 2.3 percent increase on the fare. Compare that to say paying a short-haul fare of $180 from Australia. That's about a 20 percent proportion of the fare there. So what the National Party is saying is that they are prepared to jeopardise our biggest tourism market—1.5 million Australians come to New Zealand every year and they are prepared to jeopardise that because what they'll do is make Bali a lot more attractive and Fiji a lot more attractive rather than having them come here. What they are saying by opposing the international visitor levy (IVL) is that they want to put the costs on ratepayers because that's where the costs are borne—by local governments by ratepayers.They're saying tourism numbers will drop. Well the advice—because they've been reading from the advice—says that any impact will be negligible. In fact it's so small that it's almost impossible to bother reporting on. We know that we're going to have 5.1 million visitors by 2025 up from 3.8 million visitors now.What's the price of doing nothing? The Opposition is a party that knows the price of everything but the value of nothing. The cost of doing nothing means that we risk losing our social licence in tourism. It means we risk the degradation of our environment. It means we threaten our very brand proposition in tourism. But that Opposition party is happy to do this.Both Todd McClay and Harete Hipango have said words to the effect that they want the fund to go to tourism operators. Look this isn't a business development fund. This is a fund that will support the infrastructure and conservation to make sure that we protect our brand proposition and that we don't lose our social licence. They talk about the pressure on infrastructure but they won't say how they will pay to ease the pressure on the infrastructure. They say that the fund was arbitrarily set at $35. Sorry the fund was not arbitrarily set; this was a process that went through months of consultation with the tourism sector and tourism businesses. It went through consultation with local government it went through consultation with the conservation sector it went through consultation with communities and it went through consultation with the regions. The $35 tourism levy equates to US$22. It equates to €20. That is not going to prevent people from coming here.They ask "Why is this part of an immigration bill?" It's quite simple. This Government is looking for efficiencies and we found a very very effective efficiency by using the Electronic Travel Authority (ETA) as a mechanism by which to collect the IVL. Now I've seen an app that people overseas are going to use. The app takes a photo. If you take a photo of the passport you take a selfie you tap in your credit card details and you answer a couple of questions the ETA and the IVL can all be sorted out and paid for in a matter of seconds.They ask "How will decisions be made on how it will be spent?" Those decisions will be made by an advisory group. That advisory group will be made up of folk from conservation it will be made up of folk from local government it will be made up of folk from the tourism sector and it will be made up of folk probably and hopefully from Māori communities and they will form an investment plan—a plan—a plan to make sure that we protect our brand proposition.The Opposition are making stuff up. They are trying to deliberately confuse exactly what this is doing. They want local communities to foot the bill and they need to go out there to all those communities—SPEAKER: Order! Sorry I am going to interrupt the member. Members are not allowed to say in the House that other members are making things up. The inference that people take from that is that they are deliberately misleading them—that they know what they're doing and that they're deliberately misleading them. That's not something you're allowed to say in here.Hon KELVIN DAVIS: They are confusing the issue entirely because they want local government and they want ratepayers to have to foot the bill for our infrastructure because that's where the costs will fall. The costs will fall on the mayors and the councillors. They'll fall on the ratepayers all around the country.Now this is an important part of the funding toolkit for tourism. It is not the silver bullet it's not going to fix every ailment but it's going to go a long way. We've made spectacular use of the Tourism Infrastructure Fund—$8.5 million last year invested in consultation with councils and communities on how best to address the responsible camping issue. The number of complaints this Christmas was probably less than 80 percent of the number of complaints that I had in my first Christmas as Minister of Tourism. The previous Government had marketed New Zealand as a destination they had completely failed to manage New Zealand as a destination and we had to clean up the mess—myself and Minister Sage. We were the Ministers who had to fix up the bungling the hopelessness of the previous Government and all they need to do Minister Sage is look us in the eye and say thank you. We don't ask for much. Just say thank you because we have averted a catastrophe again—averted another catastrophe—because if that Opposition was still in Government then the issues around responsible camping the overloading of communities and the facilities that visitors use would still persist and we would be at risk of losing our brand proposition.Part of taking a more deliberate and active role in tourism is strengthening the Government's stewardship of the tourism system. The stewardship involves looking across the whole tourism sector to make sure that it's working effectively across our regions and that local governments businesses communities iwi and hapū have the tools and don't actually have to front with the costs of fixing up the mess that that previous Government left behind for us to clean up.In the past our role as a steward has involved setting up Tourism New Zealand as a national tourism marketer. More recently we've established the Tourism Infrastructure Fund and that was a good fund—$25 million a year for four years from the previous Government. The thing is as I said in the first reading speech that $25 million fund for four years doesn't go on for a fifth year. It wasn't long-term sustainable consistent funding and what we're saying with the Tourism Infrastructure Fund is that for five years we will have this fund. It allows the tourism sector and conservation to plan five years in advance. It's not something that is at the whim of Governments as they come and go. We know that individual tourism businesses have been benefiting from tourism growth but the broader system didn't have those long-term funding arrangements needed to respond quickly to significant shifts in the number of visitors we've received. Again I commend this bill to the House."