Holiday park owner with six guests a night says freedom camping spots to blame

Friday, 29 June 2018

Steve Edwards owns holiday parks in Motueka, Nelson, Fox Glacier and Queenstown.

Camping ground owners are calling for a level playing field as the popularity of freedom camping grows.

Foreign freedom campers have risen from 60,000 to about 110,000 over the past two years, according to a Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment report.

Decks Reserve Car Park in Motueka - an area freedom campers are allowed to use.

One camp owner near Thames said he dropped his prices from $15 to $10 a night to compete with freedom camping spots in prime locations.

Bruce Efford, owner of Tapu Camp, said he competed with a site near his boundary and another 100 metres away.

Ben Ilton and Ashlee Ilton manage the Top 10 Holiday Park in Motueka.

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Efford said numbers at his camping ground dropped from 20 to 30 a night to no more than six.

He was frustrated that 'the council gives them prime sites to freedom camp on'.

Camping grounds are required to meet more than 10 different sets of criteria, such as providing cooking facilities and rubbish bins, whereas freedom camping sites are not required to meet any.

'We're not being held to the same standards, we've got to pay for camping grounds and all these licenses.'

Motueka Top Ten Holiday Park owner Steve Edwards said he was losing business to freedom camping sites.

'We can't compete with free. If you had something in the centre of town for free, why would you go half a kilometre out of town to pay for it.

'If I stood outside of New World and gave out free sausages, why would you walk in and buy them?' Edwards said.

Edwards said freedom camping sites in Motueka were nowhere near the standards required of camping grounds.

'A council car park with two toilets is not designed to have a hundred vehicles in it.

'Then the council comes along and puts stringent rules on me and the amount of people I can have in my place and the amount of toilets I have to have.

'There's just not a level playing field. They are giving away our product for free.'

Lower Hutt Top Ten Holiday Park owner Allen Levin has competed with a marina freedom camping site in Evans Bay since 2011.

'Nobody is paying the overhead we have to, all the things we need to be compliant to, they don't. What kind of health and safety have they got down there? I know it's free but somebody needs to be accepting responsibility,' Levin said.

Christchurch Kiwi Holiday Park and Motels owner Ross Lee said a nearby Windsport Park freedom camping site cost him up to $50,000 back in 2016. Ross said business was doing a lot better since the city council shut the site down.

'In the summer we were getting back up to 30 or 40 vans a night, whereas when the freedom camping site was on, we were only getting about 10,' Ross said.

Holiday Parks New Zealand chief executive Fergus Brown said campground owners were not completely opposed to freedom camping.

'We support freedom camping but in the right locations and with the right vehicles. If you've got a freedom camping site opened up around the corner from a camping site, that's definitely not fair,' Brown said.

Brown said it was the responsibility of camping ground owners and the council to provide quality service.

'From our point of view, the holiday park point of view, we are working on that all the time and investing money on making our product better and it is very frustrating sometimes when freedom camping spots are opened up without a serious look at this.'

Brown said change needed to be made to the current Freedom Camping Act so that councils could do more to control freedom camping.

'With the Freedom Camping Act you start from a premise that freedom camping is permitted unless it says you can't. I think it is probably around the wrong way.'

Greymouth Mayor Tony Kokshoorn said despite the increasing popularity of freedom camping, the majority of campground owners still did all right because of the boom in tourism.

Kokshoorn sympathised with campground owners, but said tourists and domestic campervan owners needed to be considered too.

'It would be a good idea for central government to get them all in the room and basically come up with a solution,' Kokshoorn said.

New Zealand Motor Caravan Association chief executive Bruce Lochore said there was more to freedom camping than the 'free' aspect.

Choosing to wake up in the morning and move location, that's what freedom camping is about.

'That whole part of feeling free and being able to wake up next door to a beach or a lake or wake up next to some beautiful scenery,' Lochore said.