The Labour Party may be useless at most things they do but one thing they are excellent at is acting like arrogant third-termers. It’s kind of weird to see people like Woods, Twyford et al behaving like entitled prats from just their first few days in the job. But three years on, and having an electoral landslide now behind them, they are really starting to hit their straps.
King of those arrogant prats, however, would have to be Stuart Nash. Nash has always come across as seeming to think he’s better than the rest of you all, but now he has confirmed it. He’s not interested in you plebs and your cheap-arse campers, he only wants ‘Ultra-premium’ people coming to New Zealand now and he wants taxpayer-funded marketing campaigns to target them.
I’M NOT SAYING WE’RE GOING TO ASSET-TEST EVERYONE WHO WANTS TO BUY A TICKET TO NEW ZEALAND, BUT IF WE’RE SPENDING TAXPAYER MONEY MARKETING NZ TO OVERSEAS DEMOGRAPHICS, THAT SPEND SHOULD BE TARGETED AT THE HIGH-END TOURIST.
Nash was in Queenstown recently having a chin-wag with Mayor Jim Boult. His comments came after being questioned on his announcement that he was planning on banning the hire of campervans without toilet facilities.
He says he’ll welcome anyone who hires a campervan they can dispose of their own waste in, but ‘‘defecating on the side of our roads and in our waterways is not who we are as a nation’’.
Well anyone who has ever done an OE to Europe in their younger days has probably done just that actually, so maybe it is who we are as a nation. But granted, this is not something we want going on, and it is a problem as the sight of bogrolls littering our rest areas is all too common.
But do we need to ban the hire of campers without toilets? Well actually, it’s almost impossible to hire one without onboard ablutions now. Every rental camper I can find is already Certified Self Contained. This means it has a sink with an adequate daily fresh water supply, a sealable rubbish bin, and at least a portable toilet of suitable size for all the occupants to use for at least three days.
Newer CSC certificates are only issued as long as the loo can be used easily, with the beds in place, and only if they have adequate headroom and room to fling your arms about. What this means is that the days of your average backpacker rocking up in a Honda Odyssey with a sink in the back and a loo buried in the boot that will never see the light of day are gone. When their current certficates run out, that’s it.
The New Zealand Motor Coach Assosciation has been on a huge push recently to cleanse the land of those type of car campers, and have even put out a list of vehicles that they will no longer certify. The smaller vans, like my own Mitsubishi L300, can still get a cert but it’s not easy.
So it seems that Labour are about to legislate for something that has already being sorted out, but nothing much they do makes sense anyway so I guess that is to be expected.
The biggest problem, of course, is that it isn’t the people who hire campervans that are the main cause of the roadside pooing problem, it is the backpackers who buy their own van or sleeper-car who seem to be the main culprit. They are also the ones who will purchase the CSC sticker illegally in an attempt to fool the authorities. What they perhaps don’t realise is that the sticker means nothing without the accompanying documentation.
Almost every district in New Zealand now have bylaws relating to freedom camping and are able to issue tickets to those who offend. But of course, very few of those tickets get paid as there are no checks when you leave the country to see if there are any outstanding fines. The system isn’t perfect, but we’re already on the right track.
What Labour and Nash, in particular, are forgetting is that their traditional voter base are the blue-collar workers. Blue-collar workers are not ‘ultra-premium’ tourists. They are the families that go camping every summer for their only annual holiday. Many head to the established campgrounds of course, but there are thousands of us who head for the hills to freedom camp.
There is nothing quite like heading in your van up into somewhere like the Nevis Valley or the Otago lakes and parking up at the side of the road for a night or two. This is the real New Zealand, we have been doing it for decades, it is part of who we are.
Funny how times change. I’m pretty sure Nash’s great grandfather, Walter Nash, who was the New Zealand PM in the late ’50s might have had different thoughts as to who was more important to New Zealand’s way of life. I reckon he would see blue-collar workers free-camping as a good thing.
But Labour don’t care. You don’t earn enough for them to worry about. They are only interested in the Rich Pricks now.
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