Alastair Crozy: Director of the New Zealand China Council discusses new visa changes for Chinese tourists

Director of the New Zealand China Council Alastair Crozy joins Ryan Bridge to discuss a new visa for Chinese tourists.

The change will allow Chinese tourists visiting Australia to enterNew Zealand with their Australian visa. Crozy says that this change has already increased searches for “New Zealand travel” on Chinese tourism websites like CTrip.

This change comes ahead of Prime Minister Luxon’s visit to China where he will meet President Xi Jingping in a face-to-face meeting.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Prime Minister heading to China this week, where he'll be
meeting with President Shujing Ping and Beijing. Ahead of the visit,
the government tweaked visa settings to allow Chinese travelers in
with a current visa who come from Australia. So in
other words, the Australians do the checks and we piggyback
off them. Alistair Crozy is executive director of the New
Zealand China Council. With me this morning, Alista, good morning,
Good morning Ryan. We'll try to take notice of that tweak,

(00:23):
because it is a tweak. We're not letting them in
wholesale without a visa.

Speaker 2 (00:28):
Sure, we'll look overnight the evidences that they already have.
Since the announcement was made, search for New Zealand travel
on some of the big platforms like Sea trip has
increased markedly. So yes, these things although they as you say,
it's not removing visas altogether by any means, it's certainly

(00:48):
a splash and it will get a lot of attention
this week.

Speaker 1 (00:50):
That's good news. What about the because the argument, while
we don't just allow them and carte blanche on visa
free is because of the number of refugees do you
know what the situation is, what the outcome might be
if we did it.

Speaker 2 (01:07):
I won't go into that on visa settings. I mean,
every country's got to balance their security settings with rolling
out the maths of tourists and visitors, not just the China.
We do that for many countries, and many countries do
that for us as well. So the main thing for
this week is that it's a positive step in the

(01:30):
right direction towards hopefully recovering some of those Chinese tourist
numbers from before COVID.

Speaker 1 (01:37):
Good pr exercise for us to be up in China
at the moment. What about some of the tensions that
we've had. I mean, obviously this is going to be
a leader to leader or bilateral meeting between the two.
Some of the live firing drills, you know, we had
our navy frigates in the straight Taiwan straight last year.
I mean, all of those things will come up.

Speaker 2 (02:00):
And from that perspective, you know, it's nothing beats a
face to face, is it like this? It's a chance
they're our prime minister to meet not just President Shei,
but also Premier Le Chang, and look, both sides freely
admit that there are going to be differences between two
countries like you Eland and China. This provides an opportunity

(02:21):
to discuss them face to face, and I think the
key thing is that both sides will remain diplomatic and
respectful and hopefully clear the year on some of those issues.

Speaker 1 (02:32):
Where are some of the areas of opportunity, economic opportunity
that you think we should be tackling.

Speaker 2 (02:39):
Oh, look, there's still opportunities in China across the board.
I mean the Prime Minister is taking a business delegation
of almost thirty people. They're focused on everything from you know,
your primary produce exports to your middle class consumers, not
just in the big cities now, but in those what
they call second and third te cities. They're coming up

(03:01):
fast in terms of spending power, but also taking a
strong delegation representing our education sector and also our tourism
sector as we've been discussing.

Speaker 1 (03:12):
Alist appreciate your time this morning, thanks to your comments.
Alistair Crozier the executive director the New Zealand China Council.
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