Page 283 - Week 03 - Wednesday, 31 May 1989
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like, is very great. I hope that nothing that happens there will threaten that potential. I think it is obvious that much closer links are needed between schools, TAFE, the public and private sectors and the community generally. The Liberal Party would also like to foster closer cooperation with industry in the design of course content at TAFE. That clearly impinges on the tourism industry again.
We need to foster greater private sector funding of TAFE courses. Again, tourism has a vital role to play in that. We want to give the Canberra TAFE College greater autonomy in entrepreneurial and marketing activities in order to supplement existing funding sources - that is vitally important - and increase opportunities for the contracting out of courses to industry, subject to strict controls. I need not mention that relevance is a vitally important question. A charge is sometimes levelled at TAFE and other courses that they do not provide that relevance. No better way is possible of ensuring that relevance than of directly linking the sorts of courses that are conducted there with the needs of industry by having industry involved actively in the conduct of those courses.
Mr Speaker, I want to conclude by saying that we heartily endorse the comments made earlier about the National Museum of Australia and its vital importance to this city's future tourism growth. I also want to put in my personal plea for the tourism commission, to which our tourism spokesman has referred. It is of vital importance. I hope that this debate is not as unspecific as the motion might suggest, that it generates active pursuit of new avenues and fresh ideas in this area, and that the Government takes them up and promotes tourism as the vitally important catalyst to our growth that it is.
MS FOLLETT (Chief Minister) (11.30): I am very happy to add my support to this motion. I am also very happy that it appears to have such broadly based agreement. The vast majority of the issues have been canvassed already, so I will be relatively brief. It is clear that the tourism industry is most important to the ACT's economy. It currently employs some 8,000 people and contributes about $370m to our economy. It seems to me that as we are faced with the need now to strengthen our own economy, to build upon it and to become more independent, it makes a great deal of sense to build on our strengths, and tourism is obviously one of those strengths.
I would like to put just a slightly different slant on some of the arguments that have been put this morning and to state at the outset that I think the ACT has coasted, as Mr Humphries says, for a very long time now on the tourism attractions offered by the Federal Government. Those attractions include institutions like the Australian National Gallery, the Australian War Memorial, the National Film and Sound Archive and, of course, the new Parliament House.
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