Raiding the IVL again to pay for the bed tax

The International Visitor Conservation and Tourism Levy (IVL) is being raided yet again by the Government, this time to replace the bed tax it had previously promised to consider.

The IVL is a tax on international visitors to pay for conservation work and tourism infrastructure. It is being subverted by the current government to pay for many other things.

The basic idea of the IVL is that tourists come to New Zealand because of nature and hence they would be willing to pay a small fee to support further conservation efforts.

In addition there are councils that need to service large numbers of international tourists, like the West Coast, but have a limited ratepayer base to do so. Hence the IVL was also designed to support those councils to provide toilets etc.

However the government has subsequently used the IVL money as a cash cow for many things.

I asked the outgoing Director General of Conservation to provide information on what the IVL was actually supporting and it turns out that only 17% of the IVL income is used to support new conservation efforts. This is because the government has been cutting the conservation budget and IVL income has been used to paper over the holes. And now presumably it will be even lower.

Nature is the primary driver of international tourism into New Zealand. And international tourism is worth $18 billion a year to NZ, or about 17% of all exports.

Telling those tourists that we are taking their money to spend on conservation, and then only spending 17% of new biodiversity initiatives, is disingenuous. 

And frankly, I can’t see how the government will scrape more money out of the IVL to give to councils without further undercutting the 17%.

By way of information, below was the reply from the Director General of Conservation in May this year:

How IVL revenue is split

 Overall IVL revenue is split 50:50 between Conservation and Tourism.

• Total IVL revenue for FY 25/26 is forecast at $190m, for FY 26/27 at $229m (however Budget 26 documents note there is a risk to this revenue being collected if the number of international visitors drops)
• The Government has allocated $55m for new Conservation investments each year – that is additional spending on new work that meets IVL criteria while supporting strategic priorities for Conservation. These investments are related to any savings or previously stopped work.
• The rest of the IVL revenue DOC receives above each year’s $55m new investment allocation (and any funds carried over from previous years) replaces other Crown revenue to fund the existing Vote Conservation baseline, aka ‘a baseline swap’.
• The table below shows a simplified version of where the 2025/26 funding goes: