The argument over who pays for the toilets, carparks and wastewater that tourists use has bounced between councils and central government since 2017. On Friday the ACT Party put a number on its answer, and the number is one dollar.
Leader David Seymour said ACT would campaign on a local tourism dividend, paying every council a dollar for each guest night spent in its area. The money would come out of the GST and visitor levies tourists already pay rather than from a new charge added to hotel bills.
“Councils will receive $1 for every guest night in their area, funded from the GST and visitor levies tourists already pay,” Seymour said in the announcement. “If revenues allow and councils use funds wisely, the $1 rate may rise over time. This policy fixes a real problem without adding another charge to the hotel bill or expanding government.”
Seymour told RNZ the dividend would hand councils more than $40 million a year based on 2026 guest night figures, and that it could start as early as 1 July next year because it needs no legislation. “No new workers at IRD administering a new tax, no new filing for New Zealand businesses, just a straight transfer once a year from government to council based on the number of bed nights, which we already have statistics for,” he said.
Those statistics come from MBIE’s Accommodation Data Programme, and they check out. NEWS WIRE pulled the full history file and added up every guest night recorded in the twelve months to June 2026. The total is 40.57 million, which is where Seymour’s $40 million comes from. It also means the size of each council’s cheque is already knowable.
Auckland would collect about $8.2 million a year. Queenstown Lakes, which recorded 4.9 million guest nights against a resident population well under a tenth of Auckland’s, would get about $4.9 million. Christchurch would receive about $3.4 million, Wellington about $2.2 million, Rotorua about $2 million and Taupo about $1.4 million. Smaller destinations that punch well above their rates base do less well in absolute terms. Mackenzie District, home to Tekapo and Mount Cook, would get about $832,000. Westland, which carries the glacier townships, would get about $750,000.
That scale is the point of contention. Auckland Council has estimated that the 2.5 to 3 percent bed night levy Mayor Wayne Brown has been pushing for years would raise around $27 million a year for Auckland alone. ACT’s dividend would give the city less than a third of that, and it would give the entire country roughly one and a half times what Auckland reckons it could raise by itself. A dollar a night is real money for a small district. For the big centres it is closer to a gesture.
There is a second wrinkle in the counting. The Accommodation Data Programme only surveys commercial providers with six or more stay units, so hotels, motels, holiday parks, backpackers and lodges are in the numbers while the great majority of Airbnb style short term rentals are not. Seymour is right that the bed nights are already known, but the bed nights that are known are mostly the ones the accommodation industry already reports. The stays councils complain loudest about, in houses and apartments let out by the night, would largely be invisible to a dividend calculated this way.
The tourism sector has been asking for the opposite design. In June, Regional Tourism New Zealand, which represents 31 regional tourism organisations, renewed its call for a national accommodation levy collected by Inland Revenue and returned to the region it came from, alongside a national register for short term rentals so those properties contribute too. Chair Andrew Wilson told RNZ at the time that visitors should contribute “in a modest and fair way” and that the group wanted to avoid “some kind of patchwork arrangement across the country”. Rotorua Mayor Tania Tapsell said in the same June coverage that a levy was “not a tax on residents or ratepayers but a user charge that enabled fair reinvestment”.
ACT’s announcement lands four days after the Prime Minister reopened the door. On Monday, Christopher Luxon said a fuel excise rise, an accommodation levy and a wider bank tax could all be on the table if National is returned in November. That is a shift from June, when he told reporters the Government was “not looking at it this term” while conceding officials were doing the work. The Government’s city deal with Auckland, signed in April, commits only to exploring a levy policy in 2027.
Brown was blunt in April about who he thought was blocking it. Asked why a levy on natural gas counted as a charge and a bed night levy counted as a tax, he said the message had been aimed mainly at Seymour. “He’s the one who’s been the fly in ointment as far as I can understand,” Brown said. Brown also said he expected a levy to arrive eventually, comparing it to the City Rail Link.
Labour has not committed either way. Local government spokesperson Tangi Utikere told RNZ in June that councils were already dealing with a large reform programme and he had asked the Government to give them more time before adding anything else.
The gap in ACT’s policy is on the funding side. Seymour did not say what spending would be cut to move $40 million from the Crown accounts to councils, telling RNZ that ACT would release a fully costed alternative budget later in the campaign. The party has argued the dividend draws on the $185 billion of revenue government and councils already collect rather than adding to it, which is another way of saying the money has to come from somewhere else in the books.
Voters get to sort it out in November. If you want to see where the parties actually sit on tax and local funding, our voting tool lets you compare their positions side by side.
Would you rather pay a few dollars more a night and see it spent locally, or have the Government hand councils a share of the GST it already collects? Tell us what you think in the comments below.
This article was written by AI, briefed to report the facts, hopefully without some of the bias people bring to the job 🙂
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