Tourism ‘Quick Way’ To Boost Export Earnings

Press, Volume CV, Issue 31061, 17 May 1966, Page 20

Tourism ‘Quick Way’ To Boost Export Earnings

(New Zealani Press Association)

BLENHEIM, May 16. I New Zealand should aim at having less dependence on agricultural exports because of market uncertainty, a teachers’ seminar on tourism was told on Saturday. The tourist industry represented a comparatively quick and easy way of achieving this, said Mr K. R. Porter, administrative officer for the Australia and New Zealand Bank, Wellington. ! The seminar, at the Portcage, Keneperu Sound, was I run by the New Zealand Travel and Holidays Association.

“As an export industry, tourism is not subject to the price fluctuations which plague agricultural exports.” Mr Porter said. “The product being sold is never depleted but, in fact, increases with use.

“Moreover, the tourist market does not face impediments such as substitutes in the form of synthetic manufactured materials in the way, for example, that butter faces competition from margarine.” Mr Porter said that the expenditure of one tourist in New Zealand over a period of 20 days would be about the amount of overseas exchange earned on 200 cases of apples or 100 fat lambs, “both of which take considerably longer than 20 days to produce.”

“I believe that the tourist industry, an important earner of overseas exchange making a substantial contribution to New Zealand’s economy, should receive much more emphasis as a teaching subject in the education syllabus,” said Mr J. L. Chapman, president of the Travel and Holidays Association.

“Many children now at school will find employment in the tourist industry,” Mr Chapman said. “As New Zealand’s fastest growing industry, with a spectacular 110.8 per cent increase from 1959 to 1964, it is vitally alive and has an excitement and a challenge which the more established industries perhaps lack.”