Page 289 - Week 03 - Wednesday, 31 May 1989
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tourism can do. I want to take up the point that Mr Duby rightly raised and support the idea that we need to protect ourselves from the depredations of tourists. Perhaps one of the ways of doing that is to pick up the regional theme - bring them here, get them to stay for three or four days, show them the national monuments and then exploit the surrounding country.
Those are three important points that perhaps have not been made sufficiently strongly during the debate, and I would ask the Deputy Chief Minister to take them into account in developing his tourism strategy.
MR WOOD (11.48): I claim to speak as a most highly qualified tourist guide, and I am sure all of us in this chamber can make that claim. I have done numerous times the circuit of Canberra, and I might say it is a different circuit depending on whom I have with me. I do not think there are too many aspects of Canberra that I have not seen. There are some that I have not seen, I hasten to add, Dr Kinloch.
With that enormous experience behind me, I will make these comments. First of all, I respond to one of my colleagues here who commented that Canberra is seen as a dull city. I know he said is "seen". I do not believe it is so. I think it is an exciting, interesting place, and most of the people I take around with me agree with that. It seems to me that the important feature of marketing our tourism, if you want to use that word, is to identify the people, the various sectors that you are dealing with. Mr Whalan mentioned the considerable growth in the five-star section, if that is the term, the upper end of the market. I do not like to use that word, but I mean that area. I am not expert in that, and I can see that it is growing considerably.
I know, as other members do, that large numbers of school children come to our city - 100,000 I am told is a more accurate figure; it has grown in recent times. That is not an area that immediately brings great amounts of money. I have taken school kids to other places and they do not spend enormous amounts. They always spend more than I ever bargain for, but they are still not the heavy spenders. They will come back, but it might not be for four, 10 or 20 years.
More importantly, I would like those children to take home with them something targeted to their parents and to their families. You go around the local shows and see children carry away sample bags full of information, or full of junk perhaps, but as school children come into Canberra, why do we not give them an empty sample bag and then as they move around the various places they can fill it. I do not think we should give them a filled sample bag to start with, because the joy is in collecting. They go everywhere, they pick up stuff, so why not give them an empty sample bag that they can then pile that material into? Amongst the
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