Page 3061 - Week 09 - Thursday, 21 September 2006
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the government, having achieved 158,000 visitors last year, was happy to set itself a target of only 132,000 this year. If Floriade truly is as important as Ms MacDonald states, and it is, why aren’t we seeking to get more and more from it? It is unfortunate that a low bar is being set—sorry about the pun—as we really should be doing more to push it.
It is interesting that at an industry luncheon last week a former department of tourism secretary, Mr Geoff Kelly, actually noted that when governments invested in tourism Treasury staff always advised against it. Perhaps that is part of the reason that this year we have seen a decline in tourism funding over the next two years of some $4.5 million and perhaps that is why the 2006-07 target is set at the same target for last year, which we well and truly overachieved but which, obviously, we are not confident that we can repeat this year.
If we are actually serious about the importance of Floriade, perhaps we should set ourselves serious targets. Perhaps we should be saying, “Let’s improve and let’s keep building,” because what we have to do in the tourism market, given the perilous state of the market around the country and around the world due to factors of which we are all well aware, is to make sure that we are getting our fair share. I notice that for the last quarter, the quarterly report for April to June 2006, the domestic figures are not available. I am sure the minister will tell us why.
Mr Barr: A change of data company, data collection.
MR SMYTH: A change of data company; there we go, a very valid reason. It is important that we have these figures and I look forward to receiving them. It is interesting to do some comparisons of visitor numbers in documents taken from the government’s web site. The problem is that the figures for Floriade will be in two quarters, the September and December quarters, but let us do a comparison for December to December of the two quarters. In 2004-05, the number of international visitors in the December quarter was 461,000. In 2005-06, according to the government’s web site, the number of international visitors in the December quarter was 349,000.
That is a significant drop, an enormous drop. You have lopped off 120,000 international visitors, and that is the quarter in which the bulk of Floriade occurs. It will be interesting, again, to have the minister tell us why this significant drop occurred and what he is going to do to repair that drop so that we do not see it again in this quarter. The minister’s answer so far has been to cut the tourism budget by almost a quarter, to take $4.5 million out of it over two years, and hope that it will get better.
At the launch the other Friday, the head of Australian Capital Tourism made the point that they had spent more on marketing this year, that they had gone out of their way to find money and sponsorship to spend more on marketing. Why? It is because it works. There is a lesson in that for the minister. Ross MacDiarmid is making that point and Mr Kelly, the former secretary, is making the point that there is a direct link between the expenditure and the visitors. If we want to achieve the $20.5 million of direct expenditure in the ACT, an increase of 51 per cent on the previous year, that Ms MacDonald pointed out from page 9 of the tourism report for the October to December 2005 quarter, then really we have to keep the expenditure going.
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