Davis KelvinHon KELVIN DAVIS (Minister of Tourism): Exactly—my role is to look after the visitors who arrive in New Zealand and make sure that their experience is the best it can possibly be. What the member is asking is what happens to New Zealanders who are looking to travel overseas and again I'm not responsible for—Tim van de Molen: Does the Minister do anything?Hon KELVIN DAVIS: —visitors who are going overseas. Now the member asked the question Is the Minister responsible for anything?" Well the answer is yes of course. I'm responsible for visitors to New Zealand and the New Zealand tourism system. So what the member's saying is that they expect me to be responsible for tourism internationally tourism overseas. Well I'm not responsible for those—Tim van de Molen: I just thought you might have an interest in the wider tourism industry and have some insights—Hon KELVIN DAVIS: Here we go again. Rather than actually asking questions that were relevant to the Estimates asking questions about what happened in Estimates they're raising issues that are the responsibility of other Ministers and asking me to make comment on what happens internationally. So if the members really want to ask about Estimates and about what comes under the purview of the Minister of Tourism I'm more than happy to talk about it. For example before COVID hit we had inherited a number of issues from the previous Government. One of the biggest issues was that the previous Government were really quite good at marketing us as a destination but not very good at managing us as a destination. And what that meant is that we had a number of communities who because of the lack of infrastructure from the previous Government were under pressure from visitors and were in danger of losing our social licence as a destination and in communities. So our first thing that we did was address that and our Responsible Camping Working Group actually started to address the issues of over-tourism in various communities. Now I can take the example of Queenstown where the mayor emailed me earlier this year to say that previous to us in years prior he had received something like five to 10 complaints a day over the December and January period and this year he had received one complaint in total over that period. That's just to demonstrate the work that we had done to address the issues that we inherited. Secondly there was a lack of sustainable funding for the tourism industry to address those issues. So we introduced the international visitor levy last year and we started to collect money on the international visitor levy—some $55 million in a couple of months. We also had a very successful year of tourism with China last year and at the start of this year the Chinese visitor numbers were starting to pick up. Of course everything ended when it came to COVID and our numbers instead of climbing of course fell off a cliff. So the Government's response to that was to put in place a broad-based response where businesses were able to access the wage subsidy and tourism businesses accessed $1.75 billion from the wage subsidy scheme. We also had the Small Business Cashflow (Loan) Scheme; we had other various tax measures. During the course of the lockdown I engaged online via the regional tourism organisations (RTOs). We had numerous online meetings. I met with close to 5000 people in the tourism industry and asked them what needed to happen. What they wanted was a continuation of the wage subsidy. They wanted investment in the RTOs so that there could be regional marketing. They also wanted support to pivot to the domestic market because everybody knows that there's going to be very little international—there's going to be no international visitors over a number of months ahead of us. So that's exactly what we did. We implemented the Tourism Recovery Fund some $400 million and we split that into two parts: the Tourism Transitions Programme was to help businesses pivot to the domestic market to help them to hibernate—if that's what they needed—or to look at other options. The second part of the Tourism Recovery Fund was the Strategic Tourism Assets Protection Programme where businesses who had an international or national reputation were supported. They had to be responsible for drawing visitors to a particular area and have significant spillover effects. And that's coming. In a very short while we'll be—[Bell rung] Just quickly Mr Chair. In the very next short while we'll be making announcements around the Strategic Tourism Assets Protection Programme.Hon Jacqui Dean: Everything he knows is coming out!Hon KELVIN DAVIS: Now the member over there says everything she knows and as the Rt Hon Winston Peters said "We could give her two minutes and she could tell us everything she knows as well." So we've done a lot in terms of supporting tourism businesses through this COVID period. We know that the trans-Tasman bubble is going to take more time than what we hoped. People had hoped sooner rather than later; it looks like it's going to be later rather than sooner. But I look forward to some of the questions from the other side related to the tourism portfolio related to the Estimates. Thank you."