While I completely agree with the sentiment, we are moving (too slowly) to a knowledge economy. It's likely now that tech is our second biggest export earner and will be bigger than tourism for the next 3-5 years at least. If tourism ever catches up after this shock. Check the graphics here:
https://www.nzherald.co.nz/business/...ectid=12281337 .
You will note that if you divide the total export earnings by the number of people employed, they earn an average 168k per person. I would suggest that is a lot more than almost any other industry (maybe oil and gas is more) as it also has a tiny foot print (office buildings, fairly low power usage, pretty low resource usage). Tourism had 230k workers earning an average of 49k per person for comparison and has a pretty big footprint (ecologically, using up a lot of land and resources). Sure Dairy earns a lot more per person at 385k per person, but it has massive resource usage, land usage and environmental degradation effects. This shows why you have to take into account the total footprint when comparing industries.
Will take another decade or two to become bigger than dairy, but it will probably happen despite the lack of investment. Of course governments could supercharge this to being huge in a decade, but they are collectively clueless on how to do this.