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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1999 Week 3 Hansard (25 March) . . Page.. 881 ..
MS CARNELL (continuing):
there selling these events in Canberra and outside Canberra, we really cannot expect other members of the Canberra community to do that. Unless we are enthusiastic, we simply cannot expect others to be enthusiastic.
Some comments have been made about the enormous number of volunteer hours that go into all of these events. It is quite stunning. I think it is a matter of public importance in this place to say thank you to all those people in Canberra who make huge efforts at sporting events, arts events and other events to make them work for this city and do it for absolutely no money and often no thanks, either. I hope that part of the MPI today is about saying thank you to all those people for improving significantly the job opportunities and the economy in the ACT.
One of the things that we do need to come to grips with as a community generally is the sorts of events that we want, how they fit together in a calendar year and how we make sure that we run our tourism opportunities off those events. I know that Jeff Kennett is regarded as the master of the event in Australia. He is regarded as somebody who has managed to buy, steal, or whatever, events from lots of other places. The approach which has been taken in Victoria and which we are now starting to take here is to ensure that there are events, festivals and so on plugged into every part of the year so that tourism dollars run off our events, festivals and so on.
That sort of approach needs to be supported by the Assembly generally. You would have to say that at times you would have to wonder whether that support exists. We heard Mr Berry get up first and speak about Kinlyside, the Ainslie craft centre and the insurance levy. I have to say that it was a bit of a joke. Is that all that those opposite can come up with - and Mr Quinlan, although he did significantly better than Mr Berry, was not all that much better - in terms of getting behind the really important issue of conducting events and festivals in the ACT and creating jobs?
One of the other things with Mr Berry's speech that absolutely blew me away was his reference to the "parlous state of the ACT economy". The ACT economy is growing at a faster rate than that of any State in Australia and has an unemployment rate of 5.8 per cent, which is lower than that of any other part of Australia. The economy is not exactly in a parlous state; in fact, the economy is going from strength to strength. Why is it going from strength to strength? One of the reasons is that we have been out there promoting Canberra as a good place in which to run events, as a good place in which to run festivals and as a good place to visit for the events and festivals that we are talking about.
The PGA golf tournament held recently in Canberra is a really good example of how events do a number of things. It is not just the people who go through the turnstiles that make the difference for events generally. Sometimes we can be mistaken in thinking that it is. Maybe I should make some comments about Canberra's National Multicultural Festival with regard to that as well. The PGA golf tournament was aired for 10 hours over two days on FoxSports TV. It was also on the Channel Ten network. The coverage reached an estimated 48 countries around the world. How better to profile and market the national capital for what was quite a small amount of money from CTEC to get that event up and running?
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