Page 2904 - Week 07 - Wednesday, 29 June 2011
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process involving studies to identify the specific infrastructure requirements of the Australia Forum, and at the same time tailoring it to meeting Government development objectives for the precinct. It is not appropriate to dictate the studies required to achieve this in advance.
They then say in response to the next recommendation:
The Government is developing a precinct plan for West Basin, not designing the Australia Forum.
That is right, because this government has no dedication or commitment to the Australia forum and this minister constantly says it is a private sector idea. At least the previous Chief Minister had some idea that money was required to get this underway, and we congratulate him on the commitment of the quarter of a million dollars to the studies that has got us to the stage where we have actually got some options on the table.
But if you are looking for a future for the convention industry, the business meeting industry, the business event industry in this city, you will not get inspiration or support from this minister. That is a shame, because you only have to read the report to see their standard option that we could double the turnover from the business event industry and, if we really worked at it, there is the potential, as a best case, to probably triple it. That is significant funding. That is money into the ACT economy. That is taxes into the government, who are always claiming that they are poor. It is jobs for young Canberrans—in this industry, particularly jobs for female Canberrans, which is always important. But it puts us in a place where we have a profile and we can compete.
From my perspective, this whole response to the Australia forum is symptomatic of a government that just does not care, and if you want to go to projects that this minister has delivered specifically, then I will enlighten us all about the Enlighten event. You have to wonder about an event where the minister had to give away basically a third of the tickets to get a crowd there; a third of the tickets were giveaways. Now, at every event there are some freebies. You have complimentaries and you give the media some and particular people who are involved, but I am not aware of any event where a third of the tickets were given away—a third.
It is interesting that on the day of the event we got a glossy from the minister. It had all the good numbers in it, the numbers that seemed to portray Enlighten in the best light that they could, but what the minister, who had time to put a nice glossy together, could not tell the committee was the true story. He claimed something like 8,700 visitations, but could not tell us how many people that represented. Well, it represented about 7,500 people. The claim was made that it brought people into the ACT, just look at the visitor statistics at the visitors centre—but do not look too closely at last year, the previous year, because that was of course the masters. Well, the year before that had about 10 per cent more in the same period for which Enlighten ran. So you have to ask the question: did it bring people to the ACT?
If you talk to the accommodation sector, I know one hotel who said they got one night out of it that they can verify Enlighten being responsible for—just one night. You
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