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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1999 Week 3 Hansard (25 March) . . Page.. 877 ..

MR STEFANIAK (continuing):

throughout the world and have probably billions of people, not just millions of people, actually watching them is about the best possible publicity that you could actually get for this Territory.

I will leave all the negative nonsense that Mr Berry talked about and get onto some positives. Mr Hird referred in his speech to a number of very positive events that have benefited this Territory greatly. In October 1990 - the paper should be still here somewhere - I undertook a study tour of Western Australia in which I looked at their events corporation and some of the major facilities which were used to attract events to Western Australia. I was very keen then to see an events body set up here and it took until we got into office to set up an events body - the Canberra Tourism and Events Corporation. I think that was a very positive step because events do bring significant benefits to the Territory. We have some wonderful natural attributes in the Territory, some magnificent sites for people to see. Tidbinbilla is one. The War Memorial is one of the greatest tourism sites in Australia and one of the best in the world. We are ideally suited for a large range of mass participation events, especially mass participation sporting events.

The Summernats event was mentioned. We did a study in January 1991 which showed a $5.1m economic impact. It has probably risen now to about $10m a year. It is interesting to note that the amount that the local government put into that was about $120,000. When I looked at events and what is the ideal ratio in terms of what government can do to assist and what you actually want in economic activity, the figures ranged from getting back $7 for every $1 you spend to a ratio of 10: 1 or 20: 1. Obviously you are getting good value for your dollar if you get more than 20 times the economic impact in terms of value to the money you actually spend. That was the case certainly with the Summernats and that was the case with a number of other events that we held in the Territory.

Mass participation events are very important. The Masters Games raised some $18.3m in economic activity in the Territory. Some 7,500 people came from interstate and overseas for that event. Canberra is ideally situated for mass participation events. We have some excellent facilities close to each other for mass participation sporting events, such as the Masters Games. It was a massive undertaking, but we showed that we could do it and the various sports involved showed that they could do it, which augurs well for the future.

I was pleased to see that next year we will have a national golden oldies festival, which is an excellent event. For example, in 1991 Perth had a world golden oldies festival and $26m worth of economic activity involving about 8,000 participants and others went into Perth from that event. Any event for which people stay for about a week to 10 days, even if only a few hundred people are involved, has a significant effect. If you have events with thousands of people involved and they stay for that period, you really do have a very significant economic impact indeed. Those are the types of events which can help bring a lot of money into this Territory.

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