Having the plates on tourist drivers' cars would make the public "more aware" of crashes involving foreigners, year 12 student and company "CEO" Patrick Back said.

Prathik Rajasingh, Bailey Wensor, Alex Lightbody, Flyn Wise and Dylan Wheatley and Back came up with the plate idea.

They decided to develop it as part of the Young Enterprise in Schools (YES) programme, which encourages students to develop a business plan and carry it out.

"We were just thinking of what we could make. The conversation of tourists came up so we started trying to figure out a way to solve that or help them out," Wise said.

While the idea has been suggested before as a way for other drivers to recognise and be careful around tourist drivers on the road, the students decided to take it a step further and develop it into a company.

The plate design the students came up with is the same size as the L plate and has a large black T on a green background.

It features a number of Kiwiana designs such as the 4-Square man, the bumblee-bee toy, a sheep, a tiki and a kiwifruit.

For $16 tourists will get two plates and a pamphlet that has a list of road rules.

"We made it with suction cups so they can take it down when they're stopped, so they're not targeted for theft," Back said.

Source

• stuff.co.nz
• Image: stuff.co.nz

Benedict said that admiring the beauty of other people, cultures and nature, can lead to God and be the occasion of an experience of faith.

"Tourism, together with vacations and free time, is a privileged occasion for physical and spiritual renewal; it facilitates the coming together of people from different cultural backgrounds and offers the opportunity of drawing close to nature and hence opening the way to listening and contemplation, tolerance and peace, dialogue and harmony in the midst of diversity."

However in the same letter he strongly condemned sexual exploitation and the trafficking in human organs, and warned that tourists must not trample on the rights of people, particularly the poor, minors and the handicapped.

Sex tourism, Benedict said, "is one of the most abject of these deviations that devastate morally, psychologically and physically the life of so many persons and families, and sometimes whole communities."

He likewise sounded a similar warning about people trafficking.

"The trafficking of human beings for sexual exploitation or organ harvesting as well as the exploitation of minors, abandoned into the hands of individuals without scruples and undergoing abuse and torture, sadly happen in a context of tourism."

The pontiff urged the Church and anyone involved in pastoral care for tourists to support the goodness involved in tourism, to be alert for these abuses and to oppose them.

Sources

• VIS
• AFP
• Image: 100% NZ Pure