SpeechHon STUART NASH (Minister of Tourism): Thank you very much Mr Chair. I acknowledge that the member lives in and represents a beautiful part of the country but I also acknowledge that it has been incredibly hard hit by the lack of international tourists. That is the reason why we did invest in the Tourism Communities: Support Recovery and Re-set Plan about $100 million into that part of the world—five districts down in that area. There are a couple of things I would say. First and foremost before I took on the role of Minister of Tourism I had a perception of what working in tourism was like and this perception is actually recognised by a number in the industry and that is that there are low wages long hours and rather precarious employment conditions. Now that I've become the Minister of Tourism and now that I've seen what goes on in the sector I know that there are just so many opportunities for young people who would like a career in tourism would like to engage in tourism and be part of the tourism offering both here and globally. But we need to change first and foremost the perception so we actually do get people considering tourism as a career going forward. It's one of the reasons why we set up an industry transformation plan on tourism and the first thing that the industry transformation plan is looking at—and keeping in mind this is a partnership between the sector between unions between iwi—is workforce development and what we need to do to ensure that we have a workforce and a career that is aspirational and a workforce that can deliver on the brand expectations that a lot of our tourists coming overseas expect. Certainly when you're paying a lot of money to travel halfway around the world you do have a very strong expectation of high service delivery. In the short to medium term I do acknowledge that there are worker shortages. My understanding is that we have signed off between 5000 and 6000 working holiday visas so I expect that number of working holiday people will come into this country. The member's marketing line that he said I think one of the tourism destinations was using to get people down here is a good one but they need to live by that: if you want to ski if you want to earn good money if you want a great experience go down to Queenstown. That may well be the case but the bottom line is the industry has to be able to deliver on good terms and conditions and good money and a great experience. I'm sure they will. But one thing I will say is we do need to ensure that the service we are providing is good. The last thing I'd say before I sit down in response to the member's queries is that we recognise that a number of businesses in Queenstown were doing it incredibly hard—it's why we offered $5000 worth of business advice and then another $5000 to actually implement that advice. So what we did is we said to these businesses: hey this is tough. I've been quite open about the fact that I don't think tourism is going to return to where it was in the pre-COVID world and the example that I have used numerous times is that pre-COVID there were 940000 people down in Milford Sound. Now that level of numbers down there—I mean people used to describe it as a camping van carpark". We absolutely were not delivering on our brand promises when I would wager a bet that 50 percent of the posters around the world advertising New Zealand carried an image of Milford Sound or Mount Cook or a destination down that part of the world. We need to be able to deliver on our brand promises. That means an engaged well-paid well-educated workforce and the industry recognises this themselves; it's the reason why we're working hard to achieve that."