Otago Tourism Policy School – Public lecture

Date:  04 April 2025

Tēnā koutou katoa

It’s great to see so many people here interested in tourism that’s sustainable for the environment and the communities we live in.

The Government is focused on economic growth – tourism on the land that DOC manages is a key part of that.

I know that healthy nature and being able to operate on public conservation land with certainty, is important to many tourism operators.

I also know you’re eagerly awaiting Ministerial decisions on the work to manage visitors better at Milford Sound.

It’s coming - the Ministers of Tourism and Conservation are working on a paper and will be talking to their colleagues on it - and we can expect some announcements soon.

I want to use this opportunity to take you through what DOC is doing to make sure people can get out, enjoy their time on conservation land and contribute to the economy.

DOC’s role

For those of you who don’t know us well, DOC manages more than a third of New Zealand’s land area, as well as hundreds of offshore islands, marine reserves, and national parks.

We are responsible for 14,000 native species and we put a lot of effort into managing threats from predators, disease and human-related impacts.

We also provide a huge range of visitor assets, including huts, campsites, picnic areas, shelters, bridges, toilets, and so many kilometres of tracks that, if you laid them out in a line, they would stretch from here to New York.

We have the largest number of Treaty settlements to implement of any Crown agency - with more than 3 thousand specific obligations and commitments to working with iwi at culturally significant places.

We operate under 25 different pieces of legislation, some of it really old and hard to navigate – for example the Wildlife Act was written 70 years ago, long before climate change was understood and before international visitor growth was a thing.

We are also neighbours across 57,000 kilometres of land boundaries and have 17,000 kilometres of fences in our asset management system.

So in a snapshot, we have very broad responsibilities – and we are doing it with 5% of the Government’s budget.

We have to prioritise our work carefully because we can’t afford to do it all.

Permissions at pace

Many of you in this room will be interested in what we’re doing to make it easier for businesses to operate on public conservation land.

You’re frustrated at the length of time it takes to get your permissions and concessions processed.

I want to assure you we’re working on this at pace. It’s a major priority for our Minister; we’ve got targets we have to meet, and we are surging our effort on this.

We need to clear the applications that are more than a year old by June this year.

As soon as we close applications more come in, so we are also improving our systems. We don’t want numbers to creep back up and create more of a problem.

We’re going at it hammer and tongs – we’ve got new technology coming to help us triage and track applications. So you can apply for a permit or concession online and track it in real time.

We’re also batching up types of applications for processing and setting up panels to assess applications – so it’s faster.

We found that processing drone applications was eating up a huge amount of our time – now we’ve worked with iwi and with our technical staff to determine in advance where drones are allowed and where the no-fly zones are.

We now process all drone permits within a week and it’s cut down our admin time immensely.

We’re looking to do similar things with other categories of permits.

Part of the backlog is caused by all the layers of rules we are obliged to follow, so streamlining our legislation will be a big help – we’ve gone out for public consultation on that and advice will go to Ministers shortly.

This is a big deal for DOC – we’re doing everything we can to shift this, to make it easier for you to work with us. It will help to grow local businesses, and we can free up time and resources to push back into conservation.

DOC is New Zealand’s biggest tourism provider

It’s important we get concessions right because concessionaires play an important role in the tourism system – DOC enables 1,000 tourism businesses to operate on conservation land and water.

DOC is also the largest provider of visitor experiences in New Zealand, with over 16,000 hut beds. We enjoy hosting 64,000 walkers on the Great Walks each year.

Conservation-related tourism is worth around $3.4 billion a year – that’s still down about $900m since before Covid, but numbers are starting to bounce back.

Most visitors come here for our mountains, open landscapes, quirky wildlife, and unique cultural heritage.

50% of international tourists visit national parks – a quarter of them deliberately seek out places of significance to Māori.

80% of New Zealanders visit public conservation land each year.

Visitor satisfaction is high, but we still have a lot to do to protect the experiences we’re promising, and make sure the environment is looked after.

NZ’s economy needs nature

Nature is key to the economy and if we don’t look after it, people will stop buying our products and they won’t visit.

70% of NZ’s export earnings are from sectors that rely directly on natural resources.

The clean air, quality soil, and fresh water that public conservation land provides are worth around $11 billion per year. [1]

Natural and physical capital on public conservation land is worth $134 billion, and National Parks are worth $12.6 billion to New Zealanders.

When storms take out DOC assets, your communities suffer.

I know there’s huge frustration when tracks like Rob Roy and Blue Pools close at short notice.

The torrential rain and floods in February 2020 which damaged more than 30 bridges and hundreds of kilometres of track, on the Routeburn and Milford tracks had a massive impact. That event, along with COVID hard on its heels, saw visitor spending in the region cut by half. [2]

We’ve been working over the past five years to deliver a $14m flood recovery programme to restore these important visitor experiences.

On the other hand there’s huge opportunity for conservation tourism – I know Real Journeys offers this – where people get involved while they’re out enjoying nature.

Another opportunity is film tourism – the Lord of the Rings series has really helped send a postcard from New Zealand to the world and we should be exploring this further.

Our economy depends on nature - but nature is in trouble.

We have the highest proportion of threatened native species in the world - with more than 4,000 currently threatened or at risk of extinction.

Climate change – more fires, floods and severe storms - are making the problem worse.

We estimate it would cost around $2.3 billion per year to look after all threatened species properly and maintain healthy ecosystems to ensure their security.

Our biodiversity budget is around $300 million – which puts us just in the ‘preventing losses’ space.

Visitor network challenges

When it comes to recreation – DOC has a few challenges.

Our visitor network is large – we can only afford about 70% of it.

We can’t replace all our existing assets as they reach the end of their useful life because we will run out of depreciation funding to replace them.

And our construction costs are going up – in recent years we spent over $3m on the Mintaro hut and surrounding structures. It costs us 30% more now to build swing bridges in the back country than it did four years ago.

Another challenge is to meet the growing and changing visitor demand. New Zealanders and international visitors want more accessible, shorter walks.

Longer tramps are no longer in the top 20 activities.

Severe weather is damaging the assets that we’ve got.

Our spending on storm repairs has quadrupled in the past five years and 300 of our coastal assets are in the danger zone from rising sea levels.

I know closures of key sites on the Milford Corridor like The Chasm have been frustrating for some operators and visitors.

It’s in an area subject to extreme rainfall. We need to be confident we’re making the appropriate level of investment for the site.

We’ve completed the geotech work and are progressing the design – but with tight resources we have to be careful.

Likewise Tunnel Beach walkway in Dunedin suffered serious damage last year from torrential rain, and we’ve got similar issues there. Similarly Lake Sylvan near Glenorchy.

Another emerging challenge is with social media influencers – whose photos are encouraging people to go beyond their capabilities to get that perfect insta shot.

We’ve also seen some appalling and dangerous visitor behaviour this summer with people driving over birds nesting on beaches, and harassing sea lions to get a better photo or video.

We’ve also had 5 fatalities this year where people have gone beyond track ends, including two recent ones in Otago.

Responsible camping is another hot topic – the Valley of the Trolls and Brewster Glacier are the two local examples where the volume of people camping are having an impact on the sites, so we are encouraging people to camp responsibly.

I applaud the actions being taken by the station owner at Earnslaw Station to keep the area pristine and reminding people to be respectful.

Another issue DOC is seeing is the uneven distribution of visitors.

Some assets are under-used with plenty having fewer than 200 visitors per year in places.

On the other hand, some iconic locations such as Piopiotahi Milford Sound or Aoraki Mt Cook, are becoming increasingly popular, car parks are overflowing and this is negatively affecting the environment.

We are working on how we manage numbers so the experience is safe and sustainable.

So what are we doing about it?

Here’s our plan for resolving some of these issues.

There are things we can do under existing frameworks, so we’ve started.

We’re taking a strategic approach to funding from the International Visitor Levy and investing it in ways that improves the visitor experience at our most popular places.

For example, national parks – people come here for nature so we need to make sure nature’s sustained in those areas.

We’re also investing in short walks – bringing tracks back up to standard, removing graffiti, re-gravelling tracks.

We’re looking at charging for carparks and more of our huts – this improves the proportion of charges to the user, reducing the cost to all New Zealanders.

From next summer we will pilot carparking charges at Aoraki/Mt Cook, Punakaiki and Franz Josef Glacier to help manage visitor numbers and cover upkeep costs – like other countries do.

I’ve already told you the work we’re doing at pace to fix our permissions system.

What’s coming

In future we’re exploring charges to access some high-volume areas, like they do overseas, to help pay toward the upkeep of the visitor network.

Currently we can only charge people who stay in a hut, or businesses who operate on conservation land.

Visitors who do short walks – the most popular activity – don’t pay anything.

We’ve been out for public consultation and overall the feedback was supportive – especially for charging international visitors more.

On law reform, we want to prune back all the layers of regulation that are paralysing us. Modernising legislation will help fix this by cutting processing times and reducing costs for businesses.

We’re also looking at our visitor network and trying different things. We want to realign our network to make sure it’s affordable and we can better meet the changing demand for experiences.

We need to build in resilience so we’re not just building back assets which will get washed away in the next flood.

We’re thinking of different categories like ‘buckets’, being really clear about what’s special to New Zealanders and keeping visitor risk and safety top of mind.

The first bucket would be the things that DOC will absolutely continue to own and maintain, things like Great Walks, highly visited tracks, huts, and campsites.

There might be some experiences that DOC wants to move away from.

Like a hut at a road end where people regularly load up with lots of alcohol and then trash it. Or parts of tracks that are continually being washed out.

And then we need to work out the things DOC would still own, but others might manage.

Like halls, pools and some camp sites.

We are also looking at how we partner with others to provide experiences – we’ve just done this on the new Hump Ridge track Great Walk – with the Charitable Trust operating it under a licensing agreement.

The Backcountry Trust is doing an amazing job of maintaining our low use, backcountry huts – and we’re partnering with them through the Community Hut Programme and funding from the visitor levy.

I want to be clear that no decisions have been made by Ministers yet – there is still a way to go. It will also be phased in over time.

We’re preparing advice on this now and hope to get that to Ministers by the middle of this year.

Ministers will need to make some tough calls on doing things differently – Minister Potaka has said publicly he wants us to sharpen our focus so we’re putting our resources into the things that matter most.

That means concentrating on high value conservation areas and species, and key visitor destinations – and working out where we should divest, co-fund or partner with others on.

Tongariro Alpine Crossing – case study

We’re already testing ideas on managing visitors at our busiest spots – like the Tongariro Alpine Crossing.

We’ve had a lot of problems in the past with high visitor numbers, people not properly prepared, and visitors not respecting the track or the mountain – in fact some would go to the toilet on the track.

We’ve been working in partnership with Ngāti Hikairo and local tourism operators and come up with some innovative solutions.

We’ve introduced the first booking system for a day walk in NZ.

We’ve got Manaaki Rangers on site during peak times to explain the cultural heritage and why it’s important to respect the mountain.

We have done a lot of research to understand the impacts of visitors, including what the carrying capacity is and what the environmental impacts are.

We’ve also added a climate station to help support concessionaries with better weather forecasts.

And we’re running behaviour change campaigns.

We’re getting results – 80 - 90% of visitors are complying with the booking system, which has given us the ability to directly contact walkers before they head out and give them the safety and cultural messages.

As a result visitors are now a lot more aware and respectful of the environment they’re heading into.

Working with Ngāti Hikairo has also helped us connect with concessionaires, so they understand the cultural importance of the landscape – hosting hui with operators has helped work through issues and opportunities.

This work is not easy, but this case study shows it can be done. We need to work out how to scale up this model and apply it elsewhere.

Again – it’s not perfect, but we’re making progress and we will test and adapt.

Cathedral Cove – case study

Another example of where we’re working with manawhenua and local businesses to manage visitors is at Mautohe / Cathedral Cove in Coromandel.

The walking track was closed for an extended period because of damage from Cyclone Gabrielle, and we had concerns about visitor safety – falling rocks, track washed away.

Funding from the International Visitor Conservation and Tourism Levy meant we could reinstate walking access by re-routing the track temporarily.

We’re pleased to see visitors enjoying the cove again – with hundreds of people a day back over summer.

We’re doing intensive monitoring of numbers – we’ve looked at how to manage visitors through car parking and shuttles.

And we had our staff and ambassadors on site over summer to ensure people have a great time and the place is well looked after.

Ongoing geological risk is one of the main challenges we have at this site. The response plan gives us a good process and guidelines to manage visitor safety and minimising risk for visitors.

The plan involves monitoring the weather – in particular heavy rain, and seismic information – if there are concerns we trigger inspections of the track and decide whether we need to take action to minimise the risk to visitors.

Mobilising for Nature 

We also want people to fall in love with nature and mobilise them into action.

We want to create a nationwide movement where action for nature is something we all do, because we are proud of our unique species and landscapes.  

But so many New Zealanders don’t see the scale of the challenge or fully appreciate the consequences of losing what we have. 

And if they do want to get involved, they don’t know how.

We’re focusing on raising awareness at scale and attracting more funding from other parties to sustain our important conservation delivery work. 

DOC and New Zealand Nature Fund are piloting a Nature Prospectus – so the public can donate directly to, or corporates can fund, three priority projects.

We’ve also signed up to the International Island Ocean Connection Challenge – to rewild three of our biggest islands – Auckland Island, Chatham Islands and Rakiura – to bring more revenue from international philanthropists.

Tourism needs nature – making Rakiura predator free will be a big part of this and I encourage you to get behind it – you only need to see how Ulva Island draws the tourists.

We’re aiming to connect people with nature – including encouraging people to get out into nature.

We will also be developing a range of actions that are easily available for people and businesses to take, including donating or investing.

Close

So you can see DOC has many roles and challenges.

We are working at pace on them.

I appreciate those of you who’ve provided feedback on our proposals to modernise our legislation and explore access charging.

I’m looking forward to hearing your feedback and having a discussion with you.

Kia ora

Related links

1. Assessing the value of public conservation land: Managing conservation
2. Report from Great South, outlines the serious economic and social impact on Te Anau and Fiordland from the twin disasters of unprecedented floods in February and border closures due to COVID-19. Fiordland counts the cost post floods and COVID-19

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