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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1997 Week 2 Hansard (26 February) . . Page.. 473 ..

MR HIRD: Mr Speaker, my question is to the Minister for Tourism, Mr Kaine. What measures are you, as Minister responsible for tourism, undertaking to address the cause of nature-based tourism in the ACT?

MR KAINE: I thank Mr Hird for the question. Mr Hird and other members of this place will know that this is a matter that I have had a great deal of interest in for a long time. For example, Mr Wood and I have done a great deal of research into this subject. I am pleased to be able to comment on it. Nature-based tourism is an aspect of tourism which is growing in importance in Australia. More and more people seem to want to have a look, particularly, at those areas that have been set aside for posterity - national parks and the like. It is all very well to set them aside, but a lot of people want to have access to them today. That, of course, presents two dilemmas. The first dilemma it presents is: How do you develop areas that have been set aside as potential tourism sites? Secondly, if you do, how do you retain the very characteristics that have determined that those areas should be set aside and that they should not be allowed to degrade?

The ACT Government has long been aware of the potential of our national parks, nature parks and the like as a tourist attraction. The Parks and Conservation people, on the one hand, and ACT Tourism, on the other, have been working closely together for quite some time to determine how we can accommodate the needs of people who want to go and look at these places and at the same time protect them. The latest product of that work was the recently launched ACT nature-based tourism strategy, which was published only quite recently. It is a major document setting the directions for future growth, based on the ACT's unique appeal to incoming tourists and positioning us as a specialist destination for this kind of tourism product. First of all, we have to decide which aspects of our natural resources people will want to go and see. We know there are some. We know that the Murrumbidgee Corridor, for example, is used extensively. We know that Tidbinbilla Nature Reserve is one of the more popular tourist attractions outside of the Parliamentary Triangle. We know that there are some areas that people do want to go and see. We do not actually have an Uluru or a Kakadu, but it is clear that there are natural features out there which are easily accessible and relatively close to high-quality accommodation, and that people do, in fact, want to go and see them.

Until now we have depended more on people wanting to see our national man-made structures, such as Parliament House, the War Memorial, the National Gallery, the National Library, the High Court and so on. But in our own commercial interests we should be securing tourists for other reasons. Our aim should be, and is, to encourage visitors to stay even one extra day and take the time to go out and see the natural resources in addition to the man-made ones. The research suggests that for every one per cent of visitors who stay just one extra day we earn an extra $1.85m a year. It is not an insignificant amount. We are working, and have been working for some time, to determine how to exploit this natural resource that we have, while at the same time ensuring that it is not degraded. We have done a lot of work. We have not seen a great deal of pay-off yet, because the means are not yet in place to ensure that we can control what happens there; but I am sure that in the next few years we will see substantial use of those resources which are largely lying idle at the moment. That would generate considerable revenue for the ACT.

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