Salesa Jenny; Strange Jamie; Nash StuartEconomic and Regional Development and TourismCHAIRPERSON (Hon Jenny Salesa): We move now to economic and regional development and tourism and I call on the chair of the Economic Development Science and Innovation Committee Jamie Strange.JAMIE STRANGE (Chairperson of the Economic Development Science and Innovation Committee): Thank you Madam Chair. I appreciate the opportunity to make a contribution in this debate as the chair of the Economic Development Science and Innovation Committee. I'd like to acknowledge the other members of the committee from both sides of the House and I look forward to the contributions over the next 30 minutes.In my speech here today I'm going to give a little bit of a summary in terms of what we heard as a committee in terms of the economic development regional development and tourism areas. I'll split my speech into two parts. I'll first talk about the economic development and regional development and then I'll move on to the tourism aspect. We heard from the Provincial Growth Fund around the $3 billion that has been invested in the regions of New Zealand. The focus of this fund has been around job creation. And when I say the regions of New Zealand" it excludes Auckland Wellington and Christchurch. But for any other region this fund has been has been available and we've seen proposals come to the Provincial Growth Fund or the Provincial Development Unit which is the Ministry of Business Innovation and Employment unit from a range of regions around New Zealand. A diverse range of proposals and investments have been made. We heard that these investments have been well received by people living in those regional areas. Like I said before the key aspect is around job creation and we have seen a number of jobs created in this area.On the regional development aspect we also heard from Crown Infrastructure Partners and particularly we heard in terms of the response to COVID-19 the Infrastructure Reference Group often called IRG. Now this group was set up to distribute a $3 billion fund—actually not to distribute but basically to call for submissions for this $3 billion fund and they received 1924 proposals. Now that was a total of around $30 billion which was more than was allocated so they worked hard to bring those proposals down to a smaller number of projects around 150 projects which the Crown Infrastructure Partners then submitted to Ministers and Ministers decided on some projects which were construction ready. They were often called shovel-ready. And those projects were funded. Again this has really helped with our recovery from COVID-19. Nicola Willis: What's your question?JAMIE STRANGE: I'm just giving an overview like I said as the chair of the committee but I will have a question; I appreciate your interest. So just to summarise those two aspects the Provincial Growth Fund and the Crown Infrastructure Partners have made significant investments into the regions of New Zealand and that has helped a lot with our recovery from COVID.The second aspect before I move into my question is around the tourism sector. Now we heard that COVID-19 has had a huge negative impact on the tourism sector. It's been well canvassed. It wasn't news to anyone in the committee. The reality is when you close the borders to international tourists it's going to have a huge impact and I acknowledge some of the members in the House here today who are members in regions where they've particularly been hit hard. Basically what Tourism New Zealand did was they pivoted to a campaign called "Do something New Zealand". That campaign was based around encouraging New Zealanders to basically be tourists in their own country. Now this campaign was very successful and the reality is that with the borders closed there was around $8 billion that's normally spent overseas by New Zealanders travelling as tourists overseas that was available to be spent here in New Zealand. And that made a significant impact on tourism operators in New Zealand. I do acknowledge that operators which were completely reliant on overseas tourism weren't able to pivot certainly had a challenging time. I certainly could go on but I'll ask a question of the Minister. So my question is around the tourism sector. My question to the Minister is: how has the Government supported the tourism sector over the past year and what work is it now progressing to promote sustainable tourism into the future? Certainly COVID-19 has given an opportunity for something of a reset around sustainable tourism. So I'll leave that with the Minister thank you.Hon STUART NASH (Minister of Tourism): Thank you very much Madam Chair. Thank you very much chair of the select committee Jamie Strange.One thing I will say is that when the Prime Minister talks about the team of 5 million how we've done so well I absolutely acknowledge that there are some members of that team that have done it a lot harder than others—a number of those members of the tourism sector and the hospitality sector. We recognised this very early on and one of the first things we did is we got a $400 million package out to the sector in order to protect our strategic businesses and the businesses that we thought were pivotal to our international brand and the ones that we wanted to really come back strong when the borders open. The main fund around that was the Strategic Tourism Assets Protection Programme. A lot of money went out there but there are others as well. Our regional tourist organisations—these are the organisations embedded in our regions across the country that do a fantastic job of actually marketing our regions to the rest of the country. As the chair of the select committee highlighted Tourism New Zealand came up with this fantastic—they pivoted because Tourism New Zealand are actually our global tourist marketers. They're the ones that go out there and promote the brand and get tourists to come into our country. They don't have a domestic focus. But what we did is we actually changed the rules which we had to do and gave them a domestic focus and funded them to do so. They came up with this fantastic programme which was "Do something new New Zealand." And we all did. I mean I went down to the West Coast. I hope a whole lot of people went to Hawke's Bay. There were actually some regions—Northland actually is a classic case. Northland actually did better—fantastic region that it is—last year if you look at the data than it did pre-COVID. The reason for that is well a couple of things that we recognise is that if it's in three hours' drive Kiwis visit there. Hanmer Springs did incredibly well. Stewart Island did brilliantly. I mean you talk pre-COVID how many people went to Stewart Island? Not that many at all. Now everyone knows someone who went down to Stewart Island. And if you didn't get down to Stewart Island it might have been because you couldn't get a room at any of the hotels and the backpackers down there. So it worked really really well. But we do acknowledge that the amount of domestic spend did not make up for the loss of international spend. And in Queenstown for example in January the domestic spend was 71 percent higher in January this year than it was in January 2000. But due to a lack of international tourists the overall spend actually dropped by 34 percent. So we recognise that and it's one of the reasons why we've gone very hard to support Queenstown businesses. That was evident in the package we put out under the $400 million package and also the second $200 million package. A lot of that money has gone to places like Queenstown. And certainly Queenstown has been a major benefactor because we recognised that they had done it hard but we needed them to survive. The thing about the trans-Tasman bubble is that we are well aware that it will make a difference. Australian tourists are about 40 percent of New Zealand's tourists pre-COVID. We always understood that in the first two weeks it would be a lot about people coming over to visit friends and relatives. And we also understood that in the first sort of two weeks two or three four weeks it was always going to be tourists or visitors at a slightly higher risk profile because we weren't too sure how this was going to play out if there was a lockdown in either New Zealand or one of the Australian states. But where this will go really well is if we have a good ski season. So talking to the people of Queenstown—and I've been down there four times since I've been Minister—it's looking good already isn't it mate.Erica Stanford: They have no staff!Hon STUART NASH: They had snow there. They had snow there in May. OK it's disappeared. Erica Stanford: No staff though.Hon STUART NASH: And that's a really good point. There's no staff. So what happened is the Minister of Immigration and I went down—well I went down. I worked with the Minister of Immigration and we worked really hard with them to change some of the visa settings there to make sure we could maximise and optimise the opportunity for our international visa holders to actually work in the industry and ensure that it could be as good as it possibly could be. And as I've said the trans-Tasman bubble—I mean it's not going to take revenues back to where they were pre-COVID. We know that. But the thing it will do is it will be the difference for some businesses between surviving and not. We're expecting a great ski season down there. It's looking good already. So Kiwis—we still go down there. This is not an invitation for Kiwis not to go. We still want you to visit all these places. But what we do recognise is that the trans-Tasman bubble will make a really big difference. There's a number of other things we're doing in the tourism sector to really change the settings for tourism I suppose. But this is all about rebuilding. It's a plan for the future. We delivered part of that plan on Thursday. When I say "we"; the Government did. But it's about rebuilding our economy rebuilding our tourism businesses so when those international borders reopen the tourism sector is able to deliver on the promises we make to global visitors when they come over. It's a really exciting time actually and I'm looking forward to it. But I just want to reiterate that I do understand that during COVID a number of operators did it really hard and I acknowledge their hard work."