Page 4295 - Week 15 - Tuesday, 20 November 1990
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The Committee recommends that: the ACT Tourist Commission and the ACT Office of Sport, Recreation and Racing develop a co-ordinated process to increase the benefits to the ACT from tourism arising from sporting events.
Canberra and the ACT, unlike other States, does not have a substantial private sector industry base. We do not have other industry of a scale anywhere near that in other States. Tourism is now our No. 1 industry in the Territory. I think the latest figures show that we have over 1 million visitors to the Territory each year. However, that really is not enough. Occupancy rates have been particularly unhealthy this last year, although there are now signs of improvement and that is very welcome, I am sure, to all members of the tourism industry. In fact, visitor numbers to attractions have been less than last year for many of the public and private sector attractions and I believe that there need to be significant boosts to tourism in this city at this time.
Like the committee, I believe that Canberra has a marvellous opportunity, which has not been fully explored, to increase visitor numbers to Canberra by a better coordinated approach to link sport and tourism. Mr Speaker, as we all know, we really have some wonderful facilities. We have some very good sporting facilities in this city compared with those in cities around the rest of Australia. Two that come to mind, obviously, are the Australian Institute of Sport and Bruce Stadium. They are just two.
We also have an enormous number of people in our community participating in sport in this city. I believe it is something like 150,000, or very close to that figure. That is the latest registered figure. That does not take into consideration, of course, those men, women and children who participate in sport but are not members of an officially registered team or teams or officially registered individual members. I think that figure speaks for itself.
Sporting groups travel out of this city all the time to attend championships and competitions. Very often they are accompanied only by volunteer officials. Consequently I believe that they are severely handicapped in bidding to obtain similar events and carnivals in the ACT in the following years. This is where I believe it is absolutely vital to have that link and to have assistance from the Tourism Commission, a very professional body which is able to give them assistance in bidding to get those events and carnivals held here in Canberra. The link between the two will be of great benefit, not only obviously to Government but also certainly to the community as a whole. During the committee,s deliberations and while receiving evidence we heard from the sports Minister and his officials of the
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