Work’s continuing on a proposed visitor levy for Queenstown-Lakes — which could raise $200 million over the first 10 years.
But if there’s a change in government, early indications are there could be a battle looming.
National Party leader Christopher Luxon tells Mountain Scene he’s ‘‘open to discussing it further’’, but believes there needs to
be a bigger conversation to ensure there’s ‘‘consistency, nationally, about how we handle it’’.
In 2019, Queenstown’s council voted unanimously in favour of a non-binding referendum in which 81.37% voted in support of introducing, essentially, a bed tax on short-term accommodation across the district.
At the time, former mayor Jim Boult said Queenstown-Lakes had the highest visitor-to-resident ratio in the world — 34 visitors to every resident — and the pressure of funding a premier international destination by what was then 24,000 ratepayers was ‘‘unsustainable’’.
A couple of months later, however, when Covid arrived, Boult confirmed the levy — which had been about to be introduced to Parliament — was on hold.
New mayor Glyn Lewers tells Scene it’s still part of council’s long-term plan assumption, and council staffers are working on it with Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment and Department of Internal Affairs.
However, there won’t be any political pushing until after October’s general election, the outcome of which will determine where proceeds from the proposed levy will go.
For example, Lewers says if Three Waters goes ahead it’d remove financing water infrastructure from council’s books.
That would enable funds raised to go towards some of the projects outlined in the district’s multi-billion dollar destination management plan.
However, if Three Waters is taken off the table, ‘‘that’s where the visitor levy becomes quite crucial in delivering that infrastructure asset base’’.
Luxon says he spent a lot of time talking to Boult about the proposed levy, and he has ‘‘some sympathy for it’’, but it appears he wants a national levy — or at least a national structure for one.
‘‘It gets very messy,’’ he says.
‘‘It’s all very well for Queenstown to make its own decision, but all of a sudden other councils start doing their own thing, targeted rates or bed taxes, there is a whole range of options.
‘‘I think if you’re a tourist to NZ, it just needs to be really simple, so we’ve got to think about it from a customer’s perspective, as well as what each individual council feels their needs are.
‘‘I think if 67 different councils go off slightly differently … it’s a problem.’’
In response, Lewers says the council’s got no plans to stop pushing for a localised visitor levy.
Pre-Covid, he says, overseas visitors to Queenstown spent between $1.4 billion and $1.74b a year.
He says the ‘‘core issue’’ for the Queenstown-Lakes is for every dollar raised in tourism GST take, ‘‘we probably only see 10%, 20% of that back’’.
‘‘We raise a lot of revenue for central government, but the investment coming back is not proportionate to the money that we do raise.
‘‘We’re looking for a more sustainable long-term funding relationship.
‘‘We don’t want more tools because at the moment the tools we get, we’ll ask for a spade but we get given three trowels.’’
