The Byron Bay File — 5…
Byron Bay: time for tourists to pay to visit?
When I lived in Byron Bay, come January I would head down to the city for a break. Why? Because January is peak tourist time in Byron. People flood in to fill the cafes and the campgrounds and crowd the beaches, the footpaths and the swells. Locals rely on them and the money they spend, however that reliance comes with a knowledge that tourism brings problems along with economic advantage. Recently, a local woman, a sustainability consultant, proposed a means of dealing with tourism’s negative impacts. A story from 2022.
HOW MUCH WOULD YOU PAY for a day ticket to visit a popular Australian seaside town? Would you be willing to pay anything at all?
That was the theme of a social media conversation I have recently been participating in. It was started by a Byron Bay resident who moved from Sydney around a decade ago.
Byron Bay, if there is anyone who doesn’t know—unlikely as that seems—is the premier holiday and tourist town on the North Coast of NSW. Situated only a two hour drive from the city of Brisbane and around a day’s drive north of Sydney, the town offers good surfing beaches, numerous cafes and restaurants and music venues in an environment of beaches, farmland and mountains. Now, it has become a victim of its own success as it evolved from a quiet seaside family holiday spot in the 1970s to overcrowding during the annual holiday months today.
The woman’s idea for a day pass to enter Byron was stimulated by the environmental impact of so many summer tourists. Her inspiration is Venice, the city built in a coastal swamp that is being overrun by tourists in their thousands and above whose historic buildings the giant cruise liners tower in disporportionate scale. Venice already taxes people staying in accommodation. The day pass is a new tax on tourism whose instigators hope will stem the incoming tide of visitors to manageable numbers. Visitors buy their day pass online. Turnstiles at the railway station check whether tourists have the necessary QR code to enter. Visitors will also be stopped for spot checks. Failure to produce a day pass will attract up to a €300 fine.
It is not hard to see that a tourist day pass tax like Venice’s would not go down well with Australians. One commenter on the woman’s facebook post said a tax would be a privatisation of public space. It would make visiting Byron Bay a right of only those prepared to pay the tax or who could afford it. Middle class people and the wealthy would be able to afford what speculation suggested could be a day ticket price of around AU$10 or so, but if your limited income or pension makes you scrape for money, well, then, too bad. The idea would efffectively turn Byron Bay into a geographical commodity.
As a past-resident of Byron Bay I understand where the woman proposing the tax is coming from. When I lived there over a decade ago, the town’s population tripled during the January summer holiday season as thousands of out-of-towners surged in to fill the holiday accommodation and crowd the beaches and cafes such that locals complained of not being able to find a seat for their morning brew.
I imagine it is still like this, only maybe worse. It is why, come January, I would head off down the coast for my own holiday in Sydney. Come winter, after my morning walk around the lighthouse circuit, I would have breakfast in the Top Pub (coffee, not alcohol), look out to the sea and enjoy the lack of holidaymakers, the more-agreeable climate and the occasional migrating whale leaping from the ocean.
Change comes
How did Byron get to the situation where the woman whose post I discuss said that people now pay $8 for a coffee in town? We can cast a glance back over the last 50 years of the town’s social history to understand that outrageously priced beverage. It is the story of a town transformed.
Change started with the ending of whaling as a town industry in 1962, just before a new water sport that was destined to transform the town was having its uneasy genesis. Those were the years when surfing started to become popular and to expand beyond a comparative few enthusiasts riding long, hollow plywood boards to a new, young crowd with their new foam and fibreglass longboards. In seach of rideable swells they took to the highways south and north in their old Holdens, VW beetles, Kombi vans and anything that could get them on the road. Discovering towns like Byron Bay that were the low-key destinations of families on their four-week annual holiday from work, some stayed. And so began the transformation of the place as the new surfing subculture moved in. In time they would start the surfboard manufacturing industry and the surf shops now an integral part of Byron’s economy.
Come the late-1960s and the opening years of the followig decade, a new cohort appeared on the streets. Although the hippies’ headquarters was in the inland town of Nimbin, a good 60 or so minutes drive west, some preferred the coastal scene and decided to moved in. With them came a desire to protect their new home, sparking the genesis of the local environment movement that was to play a significant part in defending Byron against overdevelopment. It also heralded the arrival of New Age culture in town, something you can still see the vestiges of here and there.
Byron took on an alternative, arty vibe. Then it started to change again, this time with the coming of the property boom and the wealthy, as affluent Sydney people and others sold up and moved in to retire or to seek new opportunities. Real estate prices boomed. Locals started to be priced out. Some left town for more-affordable places. Now Byron is an affluent person’s ghetto with a flowthrough of itinerant backpackers.
Tourism operators promoted Byron as the place to come for a holiday. A poorly ariculated mythology grew like a bubble around the place as a hip and desirable destination until it crashed headlong into the lockdowns of the Covid 19 pandemic. Now that has gone and tourists are once again flooding into town.
It is these surges of subcultures, the coming of real estate boom madness and the resurgence of tourism that ends in the reported $8 cup of coffee. It is fair to ask whether that pricy coffee it anything more than profiteering by the town’s cafe proprietors who charge that much simply because they can get away with it.
Time for a tourist tax?
People move to a place for a better lifestyle in a better environment. Over the years they watch in dismay and complain as others move in for the same reasons that they did and as the environmental qualities they moved for are eaten by a money-hungry tourism and real estate industry. They become restless and eventually their agitation manifests in schemes to limit tourism’s impact. The woman’s proposed tourist tax, day pass or whatever it would be called is one such scheme.
It is no secret that she is right in asserting that tourism changes places, damages the natural environment, displaces, commodifies and trivialises cultural environments as it trashes them.
As for Byron’s declining affordability I cite the case of a friend who is in the higher income bracket and who once suggested that people who cannot afford a place should go elsewhere to live. They already do, of course. The thing is that what is happening in Byron is also happening elsewhere along the coast, so cheaper places to go become fewer and fewer. There is also the difference with Byron that it is the children of people who are already living there who are being priced out, according to locals. It contravenes the traditional Australian ethos of being free to choose where you live and travel, and comes across as somewhat elitist.
Potted social history out of the way, let’s think seriously about a visitor or tourist tax, starting with the big socio-political consideration first: the idea of levying a tax on visitors carries the risk of social exclusion and goes against the democratic principle of freedom of movement irrespective of personal wealth. In imposing a financial barrier in the form of a visitor day pass on low-income people, the proposal becomes unAustralian. A day pass equals one less $8 coffee in a town cafe.
Other than the backpacker travel and accommodation market, tourism operators are largely disinterested in the economy travel sector. Affluent middle class visitors spend more, so much of Byron Bay’s tourism industry caters to them.
The question of just whom in town would benefit from a visitor day pass remained unanswered. So too would be the question of whether the council would levy a tax on overnight visitors, as Venice already does. Who would collect it, and how? And how would council use it?
Before we think about how the visitor tax could be applied, let’s consider people from neighbouring towns outside the local government area coming into Byron for shopping, surfing or pleasure. Would they too be taxed? It is not hard to see shoppers voting with their feet and heading into tax-free Lismore, the main city of the region, rather than doing their shopping in Byron.
Let’s think about the how of making a day pass work:
- how about spot identity and place-of-residence checks by council rangers in town to make sure visitors have paid their tax?; that is what happens in Venice; spot checks would apply to local people too because there is no way to distinguish them from visitors, so they had better bring their drivers licence or some other kind of identification with them and be prepared to show it to roving ranger
- how about local business collecting the tax and remitting it to council through higher prices that could see that $8 coffee reach double digits? local business benefits from existing visitor numbers, so as beneficiaries maybe that should be who does the collecting; you can imagine the outcry
- how about a backpacker tax levied on a per-head-per-day basis on backpacker hostels?
- what about visitors having to show their day pass so as to make a purchase in a shop, get a meal at a restaurant or at the pub and get accommodation? I’m sure that would go down really well
- how about an AirBnB tax in a town where a count not long ago put at 40 percent the portion of town residential properties available for short-term lease? Byron Council raised that idea some years ago as a means of funding affordable housing for those displaced from the rental market by the town’s AirBnB; Barcelona, faced with an acute accommodation crisis, banned short term rentals; Brisbane imposes a short term accommodation tax on people renting out entire properties on short rental markets like AirBnB but not those renting out a spare room in their house
- how about an environmental levy on resident ratepayers to improve environmental conditions? that has worked elsewhere
- how about upping the rates — if local people, the supposed beneficiaries of a tourist tax — can pay $8 for a coffee, surely they can afford to pay higher rates.
Now, a few points to put Byron’s woes into perspective:
- I lived in a coastal suburb in a region that receives six million visitors a year; the local council never considered a visitor tax and nor would it have any effective means of enforcing it
- I also lived in a local government area where residents voted in an environmental levy to self-fund environmental improvement in the area; it was repeatedly voted in when it came up for renewal
- I now live in a coastal location in a state in which tourism is the major economic mainstay; yes, tourists flood in over the summer and, yes, they fill campsites; locals tolerate them, knowing their economic importance to the state, and are relieved when most of them go home as colder weather sets in and the annual holiday season comes to a chilly end; never, however, has the state or any local government considered a visitors’ tax to improve environmental or any other conditions — such a measure would likely be fiercely opposed by tourism operators.
A day pass or visitor tax requiring evidence of its purchase and presented on demand to some council official would become a precedent for other coastal towns beset by excessive tourism. It would be akin to the internal passports once required in the Soviet Union. That might not the the best of precedents to follow. And how would locals react to this? They too would be stopped by roving rangers demanding to see evidence of their residency. Sooner rather than later I think this would start to grate.
Do visitors own local business a living?
There is a pervasive notion that came up in that online conversation I spin this story around. It is that visitors are somehow obliged to support local business. We know that tourism already supports local business, just as much as it benefits shareholders in the non-locally owned supermarkets, caravan parks and fashion chain stores we find in Byron Bay. Sure, a portions of the money spent in those enterprises goes to local services and employment, however those are operating costs. The profit quickly leaves town for the pockets of distant shareholders.
Supporting local businesses is good in principle, however people do not owe businesses a living, including those in Byron Bay. The notion has come up before. Why do people visiting a town owe local businesses their patronage? Do they owe businesses in any other town they might stop at their patronage? Do those advocating the idea make sure they spend their money in the towns they visit? And if not, then why not? Nobody wants to look like a hypocrite here. The idea strongly suggests that the neoliberal idea of user-pays is strong in Byron Bay, even if the user does nothing more than park and walk to the beach (they already pay for parking).
It is a principle of the capitalist market system that business earns income by offering an attractive product. Business seeks patronage. Visitors owe it nothing.
Victim of their own success
Like the state I now live in, Byron Bay has to accept a lot of responsibility for the impact of tourism because town businesses, local and state government promote the place as a holiday destination. The seasonal overcrowding, environmental damage and high cost of living become a type of self-inflicted damage.
Byron Bay has become the victim of its own success in promoting a partially-mythical laid back and hip lifestyle to pull in the visitors. It is not alone in this. Tasmania has a similar problem compounded by its economic reliance on tourism and the promotion of the state as a desirable tourist destination. Locals there, too, have mixed feelings about tourism although most know it is crucial to the state economy.
Rather than take up time thinking about a visitor pass/tourist tax, surely the focus of council and others would be better spent on doing something about the town’s homeless, employment and cost-of-living issues. Those things lay partially hidden below the surface during my time as a resident and they are still there, only now made worse by the impact of the pandemic, unaffordable rents and AirBnB.
The concerns of the woman I mention are not some imagined thing nor are they unique to Byron Bay. They are real and are just some among many issues social, environmental and economic that face the town.
I have some sympathy with the woman in our conversation. Mass tourism inflicts environmental damage, floods towns with strangers and displaces locals. Yet, if we introduce a tax simply for walking Byron Bay’s streets and sitting on its beaches, we end up with a precedent that other towns might eagerly grab at. The result would be a type of privatisation of public space that Australia can well do without.
Postscript: a final comment…
I posted this to the facebook conversation about the proposed tourist day pass.
As a past-resident of Byron Bay I understand where Alison is coming from
with her suggestion of a Venice-like tourist tax on people visiting Byron, but I find it discriminatory and impractical.
First, allow me a gut reaction to Alison’s reported $8 Byron Bay coffees. That is outrageous overcharging. It speaks heaps about how the town has changed since I lived there. Change? We can trace that through the decades of Byron’s recent social history. Byron once had this alternative vibe, a product of the surfers, hippies and arty types who made the town their home over the final three decades of the last century. Then it started to change with the coming of the property boom and the wealthy. Now Byron is an affluent person’s ghetto with a flowthrough of itinerant backpackers who create their own problems for the town. When the flow became a trickle during the pandemic it clearly demonstrated the vulnerability of Byron Bay and other tourist towns to economic downturn. They live off of peoples’ discretionary spending power.
Comparing Byron with Venice is a false analogy. Byron has no architecture of any international significance. It is really a rebuilt beach town in a beautiful natural setting. Nor does it have any other internationally outstanding cultural significance.
I liked living in Byron Bay. The town was nothing special, it was just a funkier version of other coastal towns, although they were blessed with fewer tourists. There was a mythology about it as a desirable place to visit and live, and among backpackers as a party town. What made the place worthwhile for me was the town’s surroundings—the ocean, the farmland, the bush, the mountains.
But I saw it change from the days when I stayed at a community in the rainforest at Broken Head and on through the following time of my living there. I saw how the coming of people from the cities started to displace the earlier alternative residents and become the epicentre of a real estate boom.
The people changed, although those less-affluent alternative types were still to be found here and there. I saw a sense of place evident as people chased Club Med out of town and harassed Harvey Norman’s development at Suffolk Park. I enjoyed the music at the Railway Hotel. The town changed as its CBD started out on its rebuilding. On a visit a few months before the pandemic shut the country down, I found it a glitzier version of the town I had left.
The pandemic brought a single salutary warning to Byron and to other towns strung our along our coastline: the economic monoculture of tourism that the town is built on is flimsy and is likely to disappear when the economy nosedives.
So, as a former resident, let me ask this question: what is Byron Bay? I find it difficult to answer, for it is many things to me. But let’s focus on Alison’s issue of tourism, local environment and a visitor tax, and let’s acknowledge that locals might not like my answer when I say that Byron is a warning to other Australian coastal towns about how not to develop.
The Byron Bay files…
In PacificEdge…
