Should NZ's Great Walks be privately-run?

no other country in the world with a population the size of nz's has anything like the infrastructure for walking in the mountains, NZ is unique with around 900 huts that are cheap to use and arent paid or entirely by the people who use them. and the massive volume of tracks that goes with it, the govt are no longer providing the money to maintain the existing infrastructure adequately, the money isnt coming from anywhere else. something will change one way or another regarding how much infrastructure is to remain maintained

Lloydy these European countries many have similar population sizes but the budgets are vastly different. Also these mountainous areas have been used for hundreds of years not fifty or so like most of ours so infrastructure is naturally more developed and evolved. Also private business is heavily involved most of the lodgings are expensive and money making you can eat in a restaurant. Unlike here where we cook 2 minute noodles over gas cookers on stainless steel benches. In fact comparing us to third world travel destinations is probably more appropriate than comparing us to Switzerland where most of the worlds money sit in their banks.

Firstly, I really get quite annoyed with the old apple "you really can't compare conditions/economics/terrain/blah blah blah from anywhere else to New Zealand". As incredible as this country is, it is NOT unique in any aspect. If NZ is to truly progress, that mindset not only needs to be set aside, it needs to be kicked far into the ocean. Get rid of it. It's an ignorant approach, and sound dangerously like arrogance. Learn from other nations. Pick and choose things that are working well in other countries. See how they might apply in our environments (political, ecological, sentimental) here. Australia charges for entry into National Parks. Not all, but the more well-known, accessed and 'glamorous' ones they do. And they don't whinge about it. Which is saying something, because Aussies are becoming increasingly big whingers! ;) I have no problem with increased charges on the Great Walks. There's only 9, soon to be 10. And they cop a FLOGGING! Rakiura is in disrepair, Northern Circuit (Tongariro Crossing), Kepler and Routeburn get HAMMERED over summer, and all the Great Walks see increased usage over other fantastic tracks all year round. Because their "Great Walks". I like the way Milford works. You're only allowed to go in one direction, and you need to get a boat (unless you go over the saddle to begin with, and packraft out at the end). So lets charge people. Seriously. I wanted to do Milford a couple of months ago. Cost me around $200 I think, to get a boat, a boat, and a van ride back to Te Anau. And it was worth it. Now, as for huts. How's this for an idea..... Movable huts. Don't maintain all 900+ huts. Move a certain number of huts around as and where needed. And I tell ya, people will actually start filling out the DOC trip books if this were the case! Have bigger ones and smaller ones. Drop larger ones in place for anticipated boom seasons. Smaller ones on less-used tracks. And for those tracks that seem to fall out of favour (I've read of a number of huts that don't get used for years from you guys), simply remove the hut. Seems stupid having a hut in a place that no one - or almost no one - ever uses. Really seems like wasted resources to me..... If you still want to maintain a just-in-case safety presence, drop in two-person bivvies instead, for instance. Take a look at a map of NZ from an earlier era. Then compare it to one from today. We've laid waste to a LOT of native forest. There needs to be active, almost aggressive action to ensure it isn't depleted further. Because if it is, well, New Zealand simply won't be New Zealand any more....

'Firstly, I really get quite annoyed with the old apple "you really can't compare conditions/economics/terrain/blah blah blah from anywhere else to New Zealand".' I'm in favour of learning from how other places do stuff, but my main annoyance is seeing people simply saying "they charge so we should too". IMHO New Zealand's issues are still more about us not valuing the land and what's in it than about any lack of available money. We allocate DOC's current budget because it's the value we perceive it as being worth. We *choose* not to spend extra. We'd rather have tax cuts, inefficient charter schools and gratuitous flag referendums. Each year we spend three times DOC's entire budget on keeping people in jail cells, and then we change laws to ensure more people will go into jail for even longer, despite evidence that the money would be much better spent on programmes intervening before they reach jail. The difference between DoC and DOC is that the Department of Corrections is something people perceive that we can't do without, whereas the Department of Conservation just looks after a bunch of land that most people don't visit unless they're tourists. It's perceived as something that should be entirely done by volunteers and low-paid staff who get to enjoy what they're doing, so apparently it can run more easily on no money. DOC is simply perceived as a $300-$400 million spend instead of a $1 - $2 billion spend. There's no logic with this stuff. I don't see why charging more for use and access won't merely excuse even more Crown funding being withdrawn to match. Without a clear plan of how there's going to be an obvious net conservation gain, I'm really sceptical that this campaign is anything other than shuffling money so that someone else pays for stuff, but it's money that's then more likely to feed into something like the housing bubble than into benefits for the conservation estate. The present conversation is about where funding should come from, but few people even seem to care about how much would actually be raised or where it'd go. They just like the symbolism of other people paying for stuff. The conversation should really be about how much spending needs to occur and where it should be spent. After that's sorted out, or maybe alongside it, it'd be more useful to consider where it should come from.

I think you've missed the point of this one krieg. We're not saying NZ is different because it's so better. It's different because it's different. It's easy to see the points made if you read the thread. The border tax? How does this get put aside for conservation management? Or more specifically track and hut management of NZ backcountry. I imagine a border tax would get spread very thinly over many areas. The money needed needs to be specific to track and hut management. As this is the problem we are all talking about. So really the tax needs to be directed at huts and tracks. The huts and tracks that make all the money (more specifically tourist money) are the great walks, and the other tracks popular with tourists like Nelson lakes. So we need to decide whether we charge for them or all. I still feel we need to charge them for the benefit of us. I personally can't understand the problems others have with this. We have a huge conservation estate and a small budget. We need to find a way to fund the management of this estate. Tourism is a huge industry as far as this country is concerned. We need to see how far we can stretch it. Why are we so concerned with sharing our conservation estate equally with foreign tourist who come here for a few weeks or months. I'm sure if they understood our position and what we were trying to achieve they would fully understand fees that reflected the impact and responsibility they had on this country/industry. If you don't agree how will we deal with this problem. Don't say border tax because this won't be solely used to cover hut and track management. If a blanket cost increase was spread over foreign and NZ hut and track users how would this impact NZ users? NZ users on great walks are already a huge minority. not to speak of the rest of the back country that is slowly falling into disrepair as DOC no longer feels it is worth maintaining.

I don't get the sense that the DoC estate is slowly falling into disrepair down here in Canterbury and on the West Coast as there is so much volunteer activity happening. However I was gobsmacked with the neglected state of the tracks and huts in the Takitimus a few years ago. Maybe that region is used predominantly by local hunters who are more into focusing their efforts of maintaining huts onto Stewart Island. There was not even sufficient amateur track markings to help guide us in some places.

That's the thing though Honora it's the amazing work of people like you and Everyone like the people at permolat etc that are keeping things in such a positive state down your ways. This will be the future trend of the conservation estate in places not frequented by foreign tourists. We need to support these groups.

@gaiters: thanks for that. Permolat get quite a few donations to help them with their projects on top of the recreational fund.

Just to be clear after my earlier comment I'm definitely not against volunteers. Volunteering is awesome. Conservation's underfunded, though, with or without volunteers. As a major part of this, DOC is underfunded for all the work it really should be doing, IMHO. It's meant to be our flagship government agency for taking care of the conservation estate on our behalf. Relying on volunteers to do stuff doesn't pay for everything, though. It doesn't pay for experts who can research and know stuff about the local ecology and biodiversity, and then spend their full time days putting this expertise to use for the conservation estate. It doesn't pay for extensive pest control in places where volunteers aren't, and can't easily drop everything in their lives to get to. It also doesn't pay for DOC's mandated advocacy role, including its expert submissions on a diminishing number of environment-related consent processes. It's ironic that certain NGOs, like Forest & Bird, are now finding themselves raising money from us for expensive court battles, directly against the primary Conservation agency of our own government, trying to advocate for the environment in places where DOC isn't. As far as suggesting that extracting more money directly from tourists and users might solve these issues, I'd not fundamentally say "don't ever do it", but I'm not personally convinced that simply doing it will solve much at all. Collecting more revenue doesn't automatically translate to increased spending, or necessarily spending in places that matter. All it means is that someone's discovered they can get more revenue.

volunteering is great. they do fantastic work in NZ but they have limitations, they only have so much time to give and theres a limit to where they can operate, its hard to get the consistent nationwide coverage that people hired professionally would be more able to provide if they are designated to cover the country in a more consistent way.