And that's the general theme we should be looking at.
Tourism is stuffed for a long while. Domestic travel will help, but it won't make up for the 25 per cent the Chinese and Americans provided.
And although housing is a bit of an open question at the moment, given no one really has a handle on what will happen given it's closed right now, we need to look at every and all opportunities to help where we can.
Making this a destination once again is the most obvious of starts.
We already were a magnet of sorts. What we take for granted is treasured by those that don't have it. A tiny place at the bottom of the world, isolation, an island, a sparse population and yet connected to the planet, and a level of sophistication in various areas that doesn't make us a backwater.
We are as appealing as it gets.
Troy Bowker's visa idea is a $100 billion idea. That's 33 per cent of our old GDP.
Equally, and perhaps much more accessible, is the housing market - especially for places like Queenstown, and those that rely on tourism. The world is full of people who may not have $50 million, but do have $10 million or $5 million. They are the ones that bought the big houses before.
The research showed they didn't tilt the market. They were just 3 per cent of the market - and that was just the offshore foreigners. Until the government decided we hated them, they were an important and lucrative part of the housing market.
A country needs to sell what it does well. We did tourism well, but for reasons out of our control, not now.
We still do farming and feeding well, we still export well, we are still an attractive jewel at the bottom of the world, for a house, for some land, for some investment, and for a future.
Just look at this place and put it on a brochure. If you can't sell that for top dollar, you don't know how to sell.
