KEY POINTS:
What do you do when you find your favourite camping site is for sale? You buy it. Ask the group of Northland campers who, faced with the prospect that their summer home was going to be sold out from under their tents and deckchairs, had a whip-round and
bought the place.
Refreshingly, this is a story with no villains. As we reported at the beginning of the month, a developer with big plans for the Riverside Holiday Park at Mangawhai withdrew his offer after he realised the strength of opposition among campers - some of whom have been going there since the 1970s - and the local community. The chap in question (take a bow, John Parker) says Riverside is "a magical place" and he's now one among many proud owners - along with the 95 shareholders who have bought into the place for between $35,000 and $60,000.
The happy ending is a testament to Kiwi ingenuity, though it has to be said that stumping up something northwards of the average annual salary to protect your own holiday tradition may not be within the can-do capabilities of every New Zealander. So, though we salute the new owners of Riverside, we are not pretending that their solution is the panacea for the crisis that threatens the Great New Zealand Camping Holiday.
For there is no doubt that it is under threat. Camping at the beach is a birthright of everyone who lives here - and a drawcard for the tourists who come here, many from northern hemisphere countries where access to the coast is something available only to the very wealthy.
But soaring coastal property prices have induced many campground proprietors to sell up - and developers are the only people who can make the sums work. The cruel arithmetic dictates that more and more playgrounds of ordinary Kiwis are closing. More than 20 camping grounds in the Auckland and Coromandel region have closed in the past decade.
Affordability is only one of camping's attractions, of course: most New Zealand families can stretch to a holiday in which you get to have only a couple of thicknesses of canvas and a perilous thicket of guy ropes between you and your neighbours, so you can burn your breakfast in a shared kitchen where the pop-up toasters don't pop up and join in a cricket match with 29 fielders where no one can be out first ball. But for many people the experience is priceless: it is part of their identity - the holiday they want and not just the only holiday they can afford.
Thus the steady erosion of camping opportunities is a cultural issue, as much as an economic one. The Government signalled as much when, two years ago, it requested a review of the availability of camping spots (down 6 per cent in a decade). The Department of Conservation announced that it had drawn up a list of 100 potential spots on land it administers and then agreed to develop and maintain 15 of them. Two years on, four are due to open - and a fifth is expected by the middle of next year.
It is hard to escape the conclusion that a bit of foot-dragging is going on. It is time for the Government to show it's serious about making good on former Conservation Minister Chris Carter's utterance that it "wants to ensure that the tradition of the Kiwi camping holiday is preserved".
The initiative of those who saved Riverside puts the Government to shame. DoC administers more than eight million hectares - almost a third of the country. Ensuring that more of that publicly owned land is available for the public to honour an ageless New Zealand tradition is now a matter of urgency.
