Nau mai haere mai — welcome to your weekly newsletter.

Tourism minister Stuart Nash made quite a splash recently when he suggested New Zealand should target rich tourists and discourage backpackers and freedom campers. But while there is no doubt our over-stretched and under-resourced tourism industry needs to change, as Otago University’s James Higham and Hazel Tucker explain, there are very good reasons why simply encouraging the super wealthy is not the right answer.

Staying with tourism, the promise of a vaccine and a New Zealand delegation to the Cook Islands have revived hopes of a travel bubble in the near future. As research by Massey University’s Api Movono and Regina Scheyvens shows, however, many tourism workers in the Pacific would like to see real change in the industry, including better wages and conditions and more local control and ownership.

In the meantime, of course, most of us were stuck in one place during the big lockdown in March and April. As this fascinating analysis by Otago University’s Matthew Jenkins and Elaine Hargreaves shows, many of us took the opportunity to do more physical exercise, but not everyone managed to stick with those routines once we regained our freedom. Motivation is a complex thing, it seems, but there is still hope if we learn to form the right habits in the right way.

There is a lot more here and on our homepage, so please enjoy this week’s reading. As ever, thank you for your continued interest and support. Until next time, ngā mihi maioha ki a koutou katoa.