Clipping The Traveller’s Wings

Press, Volume CVIII, Issue 31579, 17 January 1968, Page 14

Clipping The Traveller’s Wings

All curbs on personal liberty are irksome. Within limits necessary for the preservation of social order, most people claim and assert the right to do as they please. Yet few countries, if any at all, in this complicated age, are able to escape some restriction of individual freedom, found necessary in the national interest. New Zealanders have known curbs on travel expenditure for a long time, and continue to accept them with a reasonable show of tolerance. The British people are in much the same case, committed to an era of limited personal spending abroad in the interests of economic recovery at home. The American people, according to a special correspondent of the New Zealand Press Association, are resentful of travel curbs which will require them temporarily to use only half the world as their playground, instead of all of it.

They have little to complain of compared with, say, the European hotelkeepers who have come to rely on their custom. Americans visiting Europe last year spent 1300 million dollars. President Johnson has asked for a $5OO million annual saving in foreign travel, and he has indicated that this request would have legislative backing, probably including a tax on travel based on the number of days spent abroad. In 1967, Americans spent about 4000 million dollars in foreign travel, and foreign tourists spent half that amount in the United States. The deficit could be larger this year, with exchange control curbs on foreign travel outside the sterling area made more drastic by the refusal of the British Government to adjust the travel allowance to counter the effects of devaluation. The United States is finding it as necessary as has Britain to make savings in foreign exchange. Mr Johnson obviously hopes that by limiting travel the savings made actually of a relatively moderate order will hurt no-one. He could have got much the same result by imposing quota restrictions on only a fraction of the country’s non-essential imports. As things are, the rich look like having " black market ” travel to fall back on. Taxed travel will not worry them if, as has been suggested, they can cross the border and use Canada as a base for transatlantic flying.

The spread of travel restrictions from one Western country to another since World War II is reminiscent of the pre-war growth of trade restrictions. Just as tariffs and quotas restrict the growth of world trade, so do travel restrictions restrict tourist traffic, to the disadvantage of all.