I caught the ferry to Rakiura/Stewart Island in 2014 and had a great time. Have you ever been to Ulva Island/Te Wharawhara? The plant and bird sanctuary in Paterson Inlet has never been milled, and the forest, I was told, hadn’t changed much since the Mesozoic.
I went down with a photographer, Ken, to write a travel story, and I still have my notes. “Our guide has the ears of a bat and the brain of a biology prof,” I wrote, “and she interrupts her lesson on drooping spleenwort to note the youth of the korimako singing in a distant rātā, the trill of a riroriro, the shore penguin which sounds like a squeaky toy, the techno bleep of a tītitipounamu, even the sound of something heavy falling a long way – a kererū relieving itself. “A copious shitter,” she tells us, and I write this down, leaving out other more important stuff. We see tīeke, kākāriki and a streak of feathers with a white belly called pīpipi – the brown creeper. Photographer Ken, who doesn’t know much about birds, gets a lovely shot of a moulting pīwakawaka.”
The island is well stocked with kiwi, and one ambles across the path in front of us. In daylight. “The click of Ken’s camera shutter reverberates in the quiet, and she trundles away, unaware of the depth of our paralysed adoration,” I gushed.
I’ll remember my trip to Rakiura for as long as I live – except for one thing.
Southland District Council launched a $5 visitor levy to Rakiura on December 9, 2013. I must have paid it, although I have no memory of it.
It makes sense for an island with only 500 residents, who haven’t a hope of affording the facilities and maintenance needed for around 40,000 visitors a year.
The levy was made possible by a government Act in 2012, which lets the council collect a fee from visitors to Rakiura as long as it is spent on tourist facilities and services, and a broad instruction to mitigate their impact on the environment.
The levy has had no discernible effect on visitor numbers. After Southland District Council increased it from $5 to $10 in October 2023, visitor numbers rose by 20 percent the following year. In 2025 the council increased the levy to $15.
Most of the tax is collected from ‘approved operators’ who run the flight and ferry services. Anyone caught not paying can technically be fined $250, although the council doesn’t seem to have many fines.
A visitor levy seems inevitable for tourist hot spots like Waiheke and Great Barrier Island, and Greater Auckland transport blogger Patrick Reynolds is one of many to support the idea. “Tourism must give more than it takes,” he says. “Where that balance sits is for locals to decide.”
A locally administered, transparent, ring-fenced levy would give locals more power to fix things when they break.
As tourists poured through Oneroa this summer, they passed taped-off seating too rotten to sit on. Most of them would have thought nothing of contributing a few dollars to upgrade basic facilities like this. The money could also help fund lifesaving improvements to Waiheke’s dire cycleways and footpaths – improvements which will benefit everyone, not only visitors.
The devil is in the detail. Should other Aucklanders pay? Visiting school groups? Gold Card holders? Tangata whenua? And what about the administration fees? In Rakiura, around 25 percent of the levy funds go on ‘operational costs’.
Rakiura Islanders use a photo ID card to avoid paying the tourist fee. The list of exemptions include children under 18, visitors who stay at least 21 days, ratepayers, tenants and their partners and dependents, beneficiaries of the Rakiura Māori Land Trust or those with an ownership interest in a Māori land block, ship and boat owners and workers, and visitors who don’t leave the Rakiura National Park.
In Asia, tourist attractions are often priced differently for locals. In Europe and the US, an accommodation levy is the more common form of visitor levy – and Auckland mayor Wayne Brown loves the idea.
Room taxes around the world fulfil a wide range of local needs, from beautification drives to marketing campaigns. In the US, the highest room rates are in Chicago, where big downtown hotels agreed this year to a city council proposal to increase room taxes to an eyewatering 19 percent. The extra cash will be channelled to the city’s tourism promotion agency ‘Choose Chicago’, to fund an aggressive marketing campaign.
Because Chicago has a problem, and that problem is Donald Trump, who calls this great city (a Democratic stronghold), a “hellhole” and “the most dangerous city in the world”. (It isn’t).
It seems bizarre that the third-most populous city in the US has to tax its guests to fight the damaging sneers of its own president.
According to the Auckland Council, more than 900,000 visitors visit Waiheke every year. If even half of those visitors paid $2 each, it would mean as little to them as my Rakiura levy meant to me.
• Jenny Nicholls
© Waiheke Gulf News Ltd 2025
