KEY POINTS:
The driver of a tour bus charged over the Waikato crash in which three Korean women lost their right arms has denied the charge.
The 40-year-old man, who lives in Auckland, appeared in the Tokoroa District Court today charged with careless use of a motor vehicle causing injury.
He denied the charge and was given name suppression until another court appearance in April.
He and a guide were the only uninjured occupants of the 20-year-old bus, which was carrying 15 Korean tourists from Auckland Airport when it crashed and slid on its side for up to 30m along State Highway 1 on Saturday afternoon, about 12km south of Tokoroa.
Nine of the tourists were treated at Tokoroa Hospital but the six most seriously injured were flown to Waikato Hospital, where they remained last night. None was still in a critical condition.
Although the crash and the age of the bus have raised concerns about the ease of entry for low-end operators into the tourist industry, police investigators gave the vehicle a clean bill of health yesterday.
Senior Sergeant Murray Hamilton of Taupo said an inspection found no faults likely to have contributed to the crash, and the bus and its driver were correctly licensed.
The bus was believed to have been well under the 100km/h open-road speed limit when it crashed.
Relatives of the victims have arrived from Korea to be with them. Passengers who escaped major injuries are staying in Hamilton, where police gathered witness statements yesterday.
Auckland-based consul-general Joon-Hyung Kang said after visiting Waikato Hospital yesterday that some were preparing to leave for home today, amid much "weeping and shock".
He said Hamilton's Korean community had provided accommodation and food and two other consuls were staying in the city to help with arrangements.
Mr Hamilton said the tourists were free to leave whenever they wished, and noted that their tour of New Zealand would have ended tomorrow had the crash not aborted it.
The Minister of Tourism, Damien O'Connor, said bus crashes were rare but it was important for the police to get to the bottom of what caused the weekend's mishap.
It was also important that the highest standards of safety be maintained across the tourism industry to guard New Zealand's reputation as a "world-class visitor destination".
He acknowledged problems with a minority of operators who had been "pushing the boundaries" but standards were improving.
Mr O'Connor said Transport Safety Minister Harry Duynhoven had also called for a report on whether seatbelts should be mandatory on tour buses.
An assertion by Mr Kang that all tour buses in Korea were equipped with seatbelts was challenged yesterday by a Herald reader who said he had seen little evidence of them during a visit there last year.
"The Korean diplomat should come down from his high horse," said Nicholas Hirschfeld in an email.
He said an airport bus in which he had travelled had no seatbelts, and he was surprised to find many people failing to wear them in taxis or in their own cars.
The latest incident was the second major tour bus crash in the Waikato in two years to involve Korean tourists. Four were seriously injured when a bus carrying 15 tourists blew a tyre north of Otorohanga early in 2005.
Tourism Holdings chief executive Trevor Hall, whose company runs about 100 modern tour buses, said last night that industry efforts to project New Zealand as an environmentally sustainable destination were being undermined by lax Government import standards for "end-of-life" vehicles with poor emission ratings.
"It is doing irrevocable harm to our industry - no one comes to New Zealand to be driven around in clapped-out vehicles."
- Additional reporting Simon O'Rourke, NEWSTALK ZB
