Transcript
TIM TEPAKI: We are not targetting the current market. We have got backpackers and four star currently. And New Zealand is our main market. no what we are doing is introducing a five star, and I was actually doing that with the Vaima'anga, because I engaged Hilton. Hilton can take us to the world. We can't. No one even knows where we are.
So you need an international brand and also international brands, they can afford to pay. you know our problem in the Cook Islands, we are 15 small islands with only 246 square kilometres of land over, what, 2.35 million square kilometres of ocean. We are too far spread. What has killed us is the air fares and the freight to the outer islands, that's why the outer islands are dead and Rarotonga exists and nearby Aitutaki. And Aitutaki only exists because I came back and developed that Aitutaki Lagoon Resort, 30 years ago, and that gave it an economy.
DON WISEMAN: How are you going to solve all of these problems of the lack of transport and the cost of transport?
TT: Oh please, it's quite easy. The real experts in airlines and shipping - what they do these days is what is called 'wet-lease.' Merchant of Paradise is different to the likes of Air Raro, our locals eh. They have a need to own their planes but we don't. All we want is to shift traffic. So what you do is you wet lease the planes. They come with operators and all.. You don't have to worry about it. Just shift your traffic. And I can tell we have done the numbers and at the moment our local airline fare to the northern group could as high as $3,000 one way. It kills that. Now our's is $195 one way. But let's be fair to the current airlines, they didn't have any resource. This only works if we build a resort to generate traffic. So that's how it works. The key to anything is economy of scale. So if you integrate all of these things. The development I am looking at is an integration of tourism, as the lead, agriculture - we can farm, save $46 million on imports from New Zealand, and we can grow our cabbages and things like that. And then there is fishing. Our national waters are full of fish. And you integrate those three, so you have got tourism which is the driver, but international unique to each island. Then you integrate fishing and farming for food security. Then you integrate an airline, a virtual airline, virtual shipping, where it is all wet leased and any problems, they fix it, not us.
DW: And the money, you have got access to a very large amount of money out of China?
TT: Yeah.
DW: From who in China?
TT: Well it will be the China Development Bank - the same bank that supplies the World Bank and everyone else. You see we signed the One China Policy in 1997. That One China Policy says that the government of the People's Republic of China will assist the people of the Cook Islands to achieve their objectives in full in the areas of social, economic and cultural development. That is our licence for borrowing under the One China Policy regime. We are fighting for our economic freedom here. I am talking about the people in the outer islands - that's what we are fighting for and we think our friends in China will help us.
DW: When do you think you will be up and running. When do you think you will be starting to build a hotel?
TT: you know the funding was approved in 2014 for five years. It expires next year, so my friend, we have to move quick. Now the whole exercise is this. I have scopes it for our party, for the Cook Islands. The concept was, I am saying, we need partners with skills, we don't have all the skills, so we have offered Chinese partners one third. And the landowners, our people, will hold two thirds and a controlling majority share. Merchant of Paradise, by the way, owns nothing. It is nothing more than a group of people trying to get developments going, to save our brothers and sisters in the outer islands. At the moment China would not be stupid enough to engage while we have no formal government. What we have at the moment is a caretaker government, because there are petitions pending, but I would expect the petitions to over by the end of this month and then a government will be known. So I expect that come the end of the month we should be in a position to hand over the package to government. This is what I have said in a statement that is coming out [locally]. We will hand it over to government to hand it over to China. Only China is capable of assessing the risks, not our government. So as far as I understand our government is going to do simply what we want, just hand it over to China. So I will take a punt and say by next month we will be starting. But let me clarify that because the next phase is for our Chinese partners to come in and do their own scoping to prove up our scoping of the development. And if they say yeah that will work, then the funding is granted under the One China Policy and we can go in. So I expect to get physical construction to go underway by Christmas with a bit of luck, well the gearing up anyway, but approval maybe in the next two months.
