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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2002 Week 5 Hansard (8 May) . . Page.. 1351 ..

Ms MacDonald: Yes, and they spoke to me too.

MR SMYTH: I am glad they speak to you, but you cannot come in here and make an assertion that is not true. You need to get your facts straight, because we will pick you up on them if you do not.

We need to talk about the flow-on effects on the tourism industry. I think we have all heard Steve Byron of the capital airport group on radio on TV talking about some of the effects on the airport industry. That is why we were working towards the Impulse deal, which unfortunately did not work out the way it could have. The potential for air trade was something that we sought to bolster. We wanted to make sure there was choice of airlines, because that is good for Canberrans and for consumers and tourists. We wanted to make sure that the number of seats would meet the needs of the convention trade, the needs of casual tourists, the needs of Canberrans travelling and the needs of business people coming to this city.

We wanted to make sure there was also a choice in price. With competing airlines, you can have that. That is what we still hope for. I wish Virgin Blue all the best. I hope the number of their flights continues to grow. I hope that Ansett workers manage to resurrect the airline so that we get the benefits and they get the benefits as well.

We had to look at the effect on tourism, and we did that. I go back to the press release. We immediately gave additional money to CTEC to make sure that they had the ability to do extra promotions in the lead-up to the Christmas period. We had a round table upstairs in the hospitality room, which all of the industry were invited to attend, so that we could lessen the impact of the downfall of Ansett on the rest of the tourism industry. From the figures, it would appear that we had a successful outcome.

But there is more to do. In the current financial year's budget, if memory serves me right, we put an extra $1.2 million into tourism. Why? It is important. We wanted to help build up one of our more successful and more important industries that is a huge employer in the ACT.

Paragraph (4) of the motion expresses concern at the ongoing vacancy of the former Ansett call centre in Tuggeranong. I have concerns about that too. In the period when Ansett went belly up and the call centre shut down, I spoke to several firms that were interested in looking at whether they could take over the call centre, with the assistance of public servants from the business area of the Chief Minister's Department, and we were looking at a number of options that, unfortunately, did not come off. We spoke to the federal government about those options. Again, unfortunately, they did not come off. But we were out there doing what we could in the context of our resources and our power to make sure that we could get on with what it was we were doing to minimise the impact.

I remind this place that it was we who set up the call centre, in an attempt to bolster employment in the Tuggeranong Valley. We are very proud of that and other things we did to make sure that buildings were built and roads were put in place to give the

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