Claire Harvey: Who gives a fig for safety?

Where are you off to on your next holiday? What about Brussels? Nice and safe, with one of the lowest murder rates in Europe, and you can eat all the sprouts you want.

The safest city in the United States could be worth a visit - it's Newton, Massachussetts, famous as the namesake of the Fig Newton, a cake-like fig-filled biscuit invented in 1891, now the third most popular biscuit manufactured by Nabisco.

The city's tourist attractions include the beautiful council headquarters, where autumn rabies inoculation clinics are just getting under way, and the museum, which is staging an exhibition about household pets throughout Newton's history.

Your holiday is practically guaranteed to be safe and comfy in either of these friendly places, or any of the other world cities which have low crime rates.

You won't get mugged. You probably won't even get ripped off by the taxi drivers. There will be no vigorous haggling with shady touts and no bag-snatchings.

Dying of boredom is about the only danger, and that's why you're unlikely to actually go to either of these places, unless you're a biscuit enthusiast.

The point is that safety is not a big consideration when tourists are planning a holiday - so New Zealanders should not be too worried by the hand-wringing media suggestions that violent crimes are going to damage tourism.

In the past fortnight there have been two attacks on foreign tourists; German backpacker Birgit Brauer was horribly murdered near New Plymouth, and Australian carpenter Darryl Birt was beaten up during a night out partying in Wellington.

Both stories have prompted the kind of embellished stories which fill news pages on slow days, when a prediction of doom for something-or-other is always a handy standby.

Brauer's murder has "tainted New Zealand's image in Germany", says a Dominion Post story which quoted a journalist from Brauer's home town of Dresden.

On the website of Australia's Channel Nine television network, concerned readers learned of Birt's injuries in an Australian Associated Press story which described the attack as the latest in "a string of attacks on tourists".

The "string" included Brauer's murder and the recent bashing of an Englishman, also in Wellington.

Just in case any readers are already flexing their fingers in preparation for writing a rude letter to the editor, this column is not defending violent crime or trivialising these attacks.

It is just pointing out that foreign visitors - apart from maybe off-duty criminologists and the occasional paranoid grandma - generally do not consult the United Nations' index of international crime rates when deciding which countries to visit.

Visitor numbers rise every year - up 6.8 per cent to 2.4 million in the year to June - despite the fact that New Zealand performs very poorly in international crime comparisons.

Police say crime is declining here, but last week's latest UN league table of most violent countries puts New Zealand at the top for property crime and sexual assault, and in third place - shared with Australia - for overall violent crime. The report, based on telephone interviews with victims of crime in 21 countries between 1991 and 2000, said 2.4 per cent of Kiwis have suffered an assault - lower than only Scotland, England and Wales. By comparison, Japan was 0.1 per cent.

Any violent crime is sad and unfair and wrong, but these figures are far more likely to relate to family violence than random attacks on tourists.

And although there is no reason to believe criminals are deliberately attacking visitors because they are foreign, it is worth remembering that most of us take risks while on holiday that we wouldn't dream of at home - like riding in a car with no seatbelt, or eating something which does not fit into any identifiable food group, or hitch-hiking alone.

Anyway, the kind of holidaymakers which New Zealand attracts are not likely to be easily scared off.

This country specialises in terrifying tourists, who pay big money to come here and strain their voiceboxes shrieking down the Shotover River, squealing down a rocky hill inside a plastic bubble or howling with fear into an echoing chasm before throwing themselves into the void.

They're tough and they like New Zealand because it's tough and beautiful and fun, not because it's innocuous.

New Zealand's relative safety does not feature high on the list of tourists' motivations in visitor surveys, says Tourism New Zealand chief executive George Hickton.

"The fact that we're considered safe is considered to be a benefit but it's not the motivation for people coming here," Hickton says.

Promoting the country as safe is too risky, he says - imagine if a beaten-up tourist gave an interview from his hospital bed lambasting New Zealand for luring him here on false pretences.

"It's not entirely safe, no country is," Hickton says. "We don't overtly say 'Come to New Zealand because it's a very safe destination', because that has the potential to backfire."

Instead of Newton and Brussels, you might decide to go somewhere exciting this summer, like London, or Washington DC, or Sydney, despite the quite real possibility that you will be beaten, stabbed and fleeced.

It's worth the risk.