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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1997 Week 9 Hansard (3 September) . . Page.. 2862 ..

MRS CARNELL (continuing):

no, it is not -

and cultural strengths -

no, not necessarily -

and that this promotion is enhanced by partnerships with the private sector; ...

We agree totally. But how do you get those partnerships working best right across those areas? We believe that the best way to do it is via CanTrade, which has the head of tourism on it. David Marshall is a member of the CanTrade board, as are other people involved in the tourism area, as are people involved in business, sport and the cultural area.

So we believed that the appropriate way to go with the $500,000 to ensure that there was private sector money in there - we have spoken about dollar-for-dollar approaches - was to put it into the business area, into the area of CanTrade, so that we could end up with direct input from business. Now that, I have to say, is starting to bear some very real fruit. I believe that in the next month or so we will be in a position to announce some of our first partnerships with the private sector, and I am very pleased about that. It is only September. The budget has not been passed for all that long and I think it is good news that that is starting to occur.

So what is Mr Corbell really talking about now? Not that we should spend more money, but that we put the money in the wrong bit of the budget, he suggests. It is the first time that the Labor Party has ever suggested we should give the money to a corporation rather than to a department. Normally, they are the ones who go quite the opposite way and suggest that these corporations are nasty. I have heard from those opposite before. The fact is that we believe corporations operate very efficiently, Madam Deputy Speaker, but we do believe very strongly that there are two approaches here that need to be conducted together. As everybody else knows, business, the arts, sport and tourism are all under the same departmental umbrella. We believe that, by approaching this the way we have, the money is available for promoting Canberra, but not just promoting Canberra as a tourist destination - promoting Canberra as a good place to do business and changing Canberra's image out there in the rest of Australia and in the world. I do not think anybody doubts that we have a tiny bit of an image problem. That is the reason for the approach or the branding exercise we are currently undertaking.

An events corporation has been recommended in Canberra, I think, since 1991; so it is a bit rich, Madam Deputy Speaker, for Mr Corbell to pipe up now and say, "Shock, horror! All of this money should have gone into the Tourism and Events Corporation" - a corporation that was recommended to the previous Government and that they never put together, let alone funded properly. The increases in funding in tourism under this Government have been more than ever before, or certainly more than in the last few years since I have been in this place.

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