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a van in front of a beach textured photo
Camping is for vans, not roofs!

SocietyJanuary 16, 2023

Aotearoa’s last summer of cheap freedom camping

a van in front of a beach textured photo
Camping is for vans, not roofs!

For many New Zealanders, camping in a renovated van somewhere remote and beautiful has long been a treasured summer tradition. A new law will change that for good, explains Jacob Metzger.

We always rode with a third wheel. It’s not that we didn’t want it there – in a pinch, it would have provided sweet, sweet relief – but we did our best to ignore its presence. We rode up front and forced it to sit haphazardly in the gap between the sliding door and the cupboard in the back. When we arrived, we lounged in the rear while it sat alone on the front passenger seat, relegated to holding our drying towels or whatever beer we couldn’t fit into the chilly bin. We didn’t call on it once. And we never really intended to. Because we always parked up where we could make use of its permanent and much easier cousin. But its presence was always comforting. Just us – and a portable toilet.

That arrangement – a van, its people, and this slightly shiny, depletedly grey-coloured, awkward plastic defecation box – has for years allowed swaths of New Zealanders to explore Aotearoa at little cost. Thousands will right now, despite the rain, be riding to their next freedom camping spot down astride the coastline or up among the bush. Until we sold it last year, my girlfriend and I would set off like this in our early ‘90s Nissan, every other week if we could afford it, to some isolated new hiding place. Days like those, though, are almost certainly numbered due to a proposed new law requiring all self-contained vehicles – the certification which will soon be required to freedom camp on any council land unless a local bylaw says otherwise – to have a fixed toilet.

In August of last year, tourism minister Stuart Nash, introduced a new bill, the Self-Contained Motor Vehicles Legislation Bill. It’s still at the select committee stage, but it would introduce a bunch of changes, big and small, based on recommendations from a working group commissioned by the government in 2018 and a report by the parliamentary commissioner for the environment. 

Why? Well, tourism has always sparked debate, but few issues have been as clamorous as the freedom camping one. You remember, surely: tourists in decrepit, rust-plagued old death traps caught short, shitting in our city streets and native bush then peeling away in a cloud of diesel smoke, their litter and faeces strewn about the earth. It’s an image. And it’s not inaccurate, but in reality it reflects a small minority of those who choose to explore Aotearoa by van.

Nevertheless, the uproar over dirty campers has forced the government’s hand. In a discussion document released last year, the minister said an overhaul was needed to protect whatever withering social license freedom camping had left with the general public. Two years ago a petition to ban it entirely garnered almost 8,000 signatures. And in recent years, both Queenstown Lakes and Marlborough District Councils have passed highly restrictive freedom camping bylaws, though Marlborough’s one was partially struck down by the courts. This is despite it being a pastime for tens of thousands of locals: nearly a quarter of a million people reportedly freedom camped here in 2019, 37% of whom weren’t tourists.

“The thing that we really want to stop is people driving around in these vans – they call them sliders,” Nash said, referring to typical vans with sliding doors. Presently, all you need to qualify as “self-contained” is basically a rudimentary sleeping platform, a sink, some decent-sized water storage tanks, and the ability to actually use your portable john. To some, such Zen-like minimalism is the whole point.

Farewell to (fixed toilet-free) freedom camping (Photo: Getty Images)

If the bill passes in its current form, this will probably be the last summer to cheaply and easily build a “slider” in which to freedom camp around Aotearoa. If it becomes law (around the middle of the year), your freshly built but uncertified van will from that day need a fixed toilet to be certified self-contained. And so will any vehicle that needs to be re-certified (as they do every four years). Twenty-four months after the law kicks in, all vehicles will require a fixed toilet to be legally self-contained. Parliament might, after the select committee hands the bill back, decide to be a bit more lenient with all this. Or it might not.

Either way, while some would dramatically toss the current rules with feelings of “good riddance!” and disgust — the requirement to have a fixed toilet will, in theory at least, be better for the environment — many who can’t afford the new cost to install a fixed toilet will find it means the end of freedom camping entirely. Two years ago, the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment paid a firm to conduct research to help inform any changes. It concluded that the cost to upgrade a vehicle could range from $1,200 to $5,000.

It’s hard to know exactly how many people this would affect because there’s no database of certified vehicles (something the bill will change). But the New Zealand Motor Caravan Association, the largest such organisation in the country, reportedly boasts 113,000 members, while MBIE believes there are at least 60,000 self-contained vehicles in private ownership. For some of them, and for many who might be dreaming of cheaply building their own van one day, the dream, not unlike an actual house, may for now fall out of reach.

It would have for us. A van granted access, for years, to beautiful little nooks of the country that otherwise would’ve gone overlooked. It was bliss on a budget. Such a cost, though, would probably have meant foregoing the self-contained sticker, and the freedom that came with it, for the much less adventurous camping ground.

And in the end this is all, on balance, perhaps a good thing. But it’s hard to forget that the cost of living pinch is hurting – a lot. A pain that will probably only get sharper next year. Everything, from cabbages to caravans, is glumly unaffordable. It seems that even the unglamorous Kiwi camping holiday is, as The Spinoff has already discussed, no exception. Still, while it may be the cheap van’s last true summer, for now at least its austere simplicity is all you need, in all its portable throne humility.

Keep going!
Two guinea pigs strive to appear cute. (Photo: Getty; Image design: Tina Tiller)
Two guinea pigs strive to appear cute. (Photo: Getty; Image design: Tina Tiller)

Summer 2022January 15, 2023

Hear me out: Guinea pigs are the worst pets

Two guinea pigs strive to appear cute. (Photo: Getty; Image design: Tina Tiller)
Two guinea pigs strive to appear cute. (Photo: Getty; Image design: Tina Tiller)

Summer read: High maintenance and hard to love, the toothy little furballs don’t stay cute for long. 

First published August 14, 2022

I used to be like you, once. I had optimism. Freedom. Hope.

My house smelled normal. My clothes were tidy, and my grooming was fine. I didn’t walk around Wellington not knowing I had straw stuck to my tights, or a tiny turd clinging to my cardigan.

I could pass a pet shop without going in. I’d never buy hay by the bale, carrots in bulk or vials of Ivermectin, in cash, from people who knew people. But now I do it all, because we have guinea pigs. Guinea pigs are the worst.

Guinea pig owners aren’t normal. They’re screwy in the head. It’s not clear whether the guinea pigs screwed them or if they were screwy to start with, which attracted them to the guinea pigs. Anyway, I know someone with a dead pet pig, George, in the freezer. She’s waiting for their other pig Bryan to pass, so they can be buried together. What’s worse, when I heard this, it seemed reasonable. This is because I have now joined her club.

Our daughter begged for months for a guinea pig. There wasn’t a heap I liked about the idea as we already had a cat. But the novelty appealed. In Karori most people have a poodle mix, so getting a pig felt bohemian. Almost like getting a snake.

Every library book and pet shop vouched hard for the sweetness of guinea pigs. They’re odourless! Smart! We watched the Guinea Pig Olympics on YouTube, where pigs shot through hoops and bounced over seesaws in a blur of pink claws, ginger fur and goofy overbites.

What finally got her over the line was her PowerPoint presentation to her father. He loves a business case and so the next afternoon dragged home a hutch, a sack of pellets and a food bowl for small mammals, shaped like an upturned leaf. Cute! I turned the dish over and that piece of junk had cost $24.

Next, we visited a guinea pig sanctuary, whose rows of inmates eyeballed us as we chose. Turns out these are sociable animals, and you need to get at least two of them. The pair must already be bonded or might rip chunks off each other (wait, what?). Meanwhile the custodian told us several of these pigs had been returned by owners who, sadly, could no longer keep them. Not asking “Why, exactly?” may be the regret of my life.

We took home two males: a big patchy one we called Truffle and a little black one, Pudding. They shot straight into their nesting boxes and took two months to forgive us. They expressed their disdain through the medium of urine and lozenge-shaped excrement, and by eating their excrement. I’m not sure my daughter is over the shock. By week two, the guinea pigs had become mine.

These pigs pee so much, they soak five absorbent puppy pads at a time. I fill half a bin-bag with mucky straw every second day. I clean, chop vegetables, check them for lice. I provide enrichment for their tiny brains (empty toilet rolls and ping pong balls). I talk to them like they’re listening, but they’re just waiting for me to sod off. Guinea pigs are prey animals and see everything as a threat. I can understand why, because now I too want to kill them.

The other day I got excited because Pudding tossed his nose and exposed his wobbly double-chin to me. It felt profound, like a human-to-animal breakthrough. But I looked it up and he was just asserting his dominance. The rat-faced little prick.

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Toby Manhire
— Editor-at-large
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