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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1997 Week 3 Hansard (8 April) . . Page.. 671 ..

MR KAINE (continuing):

You can put out all sorts of figures and say that we do not spend as much money as Tasmania and the Northern Territory. That is easy to say, but those comparisons are meaningless. We are told that we have almost as many residents in Canberra as Tasmania has and therefore we ought to be putting as much money into our tourism budget. That, also, is meaningless. If you stack up Tasmania's total budget against our total budget, and the Northern Territory's total budget against our total budget, our budget pales into insignificance. It has nothing to do with the number of people who live here.

It does have a great deal to do with the fact that Tasmania and the Northern Territory, by our standards, have an infinite tax base from which they can collect revenue and therefore finance tourism. We do not have that tax base. We do not have natural resources, we do not have any mining, we do not have any manufacturing. How on earth can we expect to produce revenues and generate money for tourism at the same levels, in absolute dollars, as either the Northern Territory or Tasmania? I remind the Opposition, as Mr Hird has already, that in the five years they were in government they did not spend any more money on tourism in any one of those years than we are currently spending, and the reason they did not do it was that they did not have it. While saying that it is nice to have more money to spend, there is no point in saying that unless you can come up with the remedy.

I do not know whether we can come up with the remedy, but we are establishing the machinery through which an organisation can have more flexibility in the way it finances tourism operations in the ACT. I believe it is not unreasonable to say that the industry and the business world out there, which directly benefits from an increase in tourism, should be spending some of its money to achieve an enhanced outcome. I do not think that is an unfair statement at all. But it does not end there, either. I agree that, when the Government can make more money available to attract more tourists to this city, it should. Mr Corbell mentioned this. I have already asked the Chief Minister and Treasurer for an enhanced allocation of funding for a specific marketing campaign this fiscal year. I could have asked for $10m, but I would not have got it. I asked for a reasonable figure of $1m, and the odds are that, in cooperation with the industry, we will get it, or close to it. There is no point in setting our targets too high, setting objectives that cannot be achieved.

If the Opposition can tell me how to go about injecting substantially more money into the tourism industry than we currently do, I would love to hear from them. Mr Wood was in government for five years. If he has any ideas on how we can get more money out of the system for tourism, I would love to hear them. If Mr Corbell, who has come with a new face and perhaps a different approach, can tell me where we can get more money for the tourism industry than we are currently spending, I would love to hear from him. I would love to hear from either of them or both of them. My office door is always open. The Government will do what it can, and I will certainly be battling every inch of the way for every additional dollar I can get, because it can only be good for this community and the wellbeing of this society in the longer term.

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