Page 3222 - Week 12 - Wednesday, 18 November 1992
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on accommodation in this town - not one cent. Furthermore, more than half of those 1.3 million people, that is 650,000 of them, did not spend any money on shopping. This is out of the same document. Nearly all of those visitors - 94 per cent - did not spend any money on tours. So, one has to ask: What do they spend their money on? Most of them come to town in their motor cars, they stay with friends, and they get in their cars and leave town; and we are claiming that this is a great tourism victory.
Mr Deputy Speaker, all I am suggesting is that we have a long way to go. There are a lot of gaps in the statistics that need to be filled out before people start crowing about 1.3 million tourists coming to Canberra. First of all, they are not tourists; secondly, they are not here for tourism purposes; and, thirdly, most of them do not spend any money while they are here.
I move on from there to sound a second warning. Much of the claim for the success of tourism is based, as I said before, on these special events. We hear about the National Gallery exhibitions; we hear about the Vietnam weekend. None of these had anything to do with the ACT Government. What we are saying is that Betty Churcher has a better tourism organisation than our own. She brings more genuine tourists into this town than we do.
Mr Lamont: In cooperation with the Tourism Commission.
MR KAINE: I notice that the Tourism Commissioner is sitting up the back. I am not saying this behind his back. I know that he is there. I am well aware of it. What I am suggesting to you, the Government, and to the commissioner is that we have a long way to go yet. Let us not pat ourselves on the back and say what a good job we are doing and that everything is lovely; it is not.
Mr Berry: What about the GST? What are you going to do about that?
MR KAINE: The GST will see a massive injection of funds into this Territory. By the time you take away your Government's wholesale taxes, petrol taxes and all the other taxes, and add the 15 per cent GST, we will be millions of dollars in front. That is where we will be. You can snipe about it, but do your sums, do your homework. Do not listen to the Socialist Left of the Labor Party; do your own homework. Mr Deputy Speaker, I think I have raised enough points, based on the Government's own statistics, to suggest that there is still work to be done. That is not to denigrate what has been done, but let us not beat our chests and say how great we are when there is so far still to go.
The only other point that I wanted to make, Mr Deputy Speaker, is this: I am astounded that the Chief Minister and the other members of the Government have recognised the Vietnam memorial weekend only in terms of how much money it brought into this town. I quote, Mr Deputy Speaker, the Chief Minister from Hansard of 13 October, where it talks about only the $9m. In fact, I think that in here she said that $4m was injected, and that was all she talked about. Later, on 21 October, she made a statement in this house on all the good stuff we were doing. She upped the ante to $9.5m. But nowhere did she talk about the reason why that weekend was a success.
It had nothing to do with this Government and it was nothing to do with money. To convert that down - I will be even more materialistic - it comes down to $380 for every person that came to Canberra for the Vietnam memorial weekend, if you want to express it in dollars and cents. I think it is scandalous. Even our
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