New Zealand to Charge Foreign Visitors at Popular Tourist Sites
The country's pristine national parks and great walks are 'truly special to New Zealanders' and foreigners should pay a fee at high traffic sites, Prime Minister Christopher Luxon said in a speech Saturday. The NZ$62 million in annual revenue generated will be re-invested into those locations, he said.
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44 minutes ago
- Yahoo
Council ditches bid to join iconic tourism strip
A Victorian council has ended a decade-long bid to be included in the renowned Great Ocean Road. The Glenelg Shire Council in far southwest Victoria is blaming state and national marketing campaigns for not including their region. Despite not being on the Great Ocean Road itself, the Glenelg council had been paying $80,000 a year to be part of the Great Ocean Road Regional Tourism Board. In a statement on the council website, posted earlier this month, the council says it is time to cut the chord. 'From 2015, Glenelg Shire Council have been a member of the Great Ocean Road Regional Tourism Board (GORRT),' a spokesperson said. 'Council has found that although GORRT have been strong in their advocacy and attempts to link the Glenelg Shire to the Great Ocean Road, the Glenelg Shire is simply not officially recognised by our state and federal partners as being part of the Great Ocean Road. 'We are regularly omitted from marketing, tourism campaigns and strategies.' The Great Ocean Road generates $1.9bn of economic activity each year, the state government says, creating 9800 local jobs. Tourism Australia launched its new major campaign last week, and the only Victorian location featured was the Twelve Apostles, which is on the western half of the tourism strip. The Glenelg Shire is west of the actual Great Ocean Road, despite paying $80,000 a year to the road's tourism board. Membership gives businesses and organisations access to marketing on tourism websites. 'Council has chosen not to continue with GORRT, instead redirecting the $80,000 per year membership fee to directly invest in tailored opportunities that better align with the unique needs and potential of our region,' the council spokesperson said. The Glenelg Shire will instead focus on promoting its nationally recognised Kelpie Festival, and the UNESCO World Heritage-listed Budj Bim Cultural Landscape; the first place in Australia to be recognised solely for its Aboriginal cultural values. A state government spokesperson said Great Ocean Road Regional Tourism Board was in charge of tourism for the region. 'We will continue to work with Glenelg Shire to encourage visitors to visit southwest Victoria and experience the best of the Great Ocean Road,' the spokesperson said.
New York Times
an hour ago
- New York Times
There Is a Specter Haunting Trump's Economy: Stagflation
Since President Trump took office, economists have been waiting for his policies to work their way through the U.S. economy and reveal their consequences. The soft data, mostly surveys of consumers and businesses that track how people feel about the economy, turned down sharply months ago, while the hard data — jobs, G.D.P. growth, inflation — all seemed fine. But recently, a telling series of hard economic data rolled in that has rightfully raised alarm bells about slowing growth and increased inflation — a dreaded economic combination known as stagflation. Mr. Trump's tariffs are now clearly fueling inflation, particularly in goods such as home appliances, cars and food. In the first six months of the year, real (that is, inflation-adjusted) consumer spending, the main driver behind business cycles and robust economic expansion, barely grew, after rising 3 percent last year. G.D.P. growth slowed by about half, to 1.2 percent this year from 2.5 percent last year. When overall growth falls that sharply, the labor market tends to follow, which is precisely what happened: Job growth, at 35,000 per month on average between May and July, is dangerously close to stall speed. While presidents always take credit for good economic news and try to deflect bad news (in this president's case, by firing the messenger who delivered it), it's often hard to link what's going on in the economy to the current administration. Not this time. Whether it's historically high tariffs that never quite seem to stabilize, deportations that threaten to seriously disrupt labor supply in sectors like construction and health services, or a reverse-Robin Hood, budget-busting bill that takes money away from those most likely to spend it, Mr. Trump's policies have pushed economic uncertainty to levels last seen during the onset of the pandemic. This uncertainty has damped investment, hiring and consumption, while the tariffs increase prices. In other words: stagflation. For many American adults, the specter of stagflation may conjure thoughts of the 1970s. But if Mr. Trump's stagflation continues to grow, it will be different in one very important way: The economic damage will be almost entirely self-inflicted. In the '70s, stagflation was caused not by an unconstrained president but by 'exogenous shocks,' meaning big, unexpected disruptions originating from events outside the country and exacerbated by the inaction of the Federal Reserve to offset them. The biggest, and most famous, of these shocks involved the oil market. Because of the oil embargo the Organization of Arab Petroleum Exporting Countries imposed on the United States in 1973 and the Iranian Revolution in 1979, the price of oil increased more than tenfold. As a result, by 1980, the United States was spending roughly six times as much on oil as it was in 1970. That change reverberated throughout the economy and caused inflation to reach a high of nearly 15 percent by the end of the decade. In what is now a famous horror story of monetary policy gone wrong, the Fed not only failed to respond to the rising inflationary pressures in the '70s; it actively made them worse. The reason was in part political: Arthur Burns yielded to pressure from the Nixon White House to disregard concerns about rising inflation and keep interest rates low to hold down unemployment. (Sound familiar?) The resulting stagflation crisis ended only when a new Fed chair, Paul Volcker, raised rates to almost 20 percent in 1980, leading to a deep and painful recession. Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
Yahoo
3 hours ago
- Yahoo
Could AI help America out of its debt hole?
When US President Donald Trump unveiled his 'big, beautiful bill' (BBB) last month, critics used data from Washington's Congressional
