Page 2883 - Week 09 - Wednesday, 17 September 2014
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There is no doubt that the $480 million investment in Canberra Airport and the supporting infrastructure there has delivered a fitting gateway for our city, and certainly provides a solid platform for future economic growth—including the capacity to support direct international flights. The cooperative airline stimulus fund will support our ongoing efforts in partnership with Canberra Airport to secure new flights for our city, both international and domestic. As I have said I think on a dozen occasions in this place in the last 12 months, low-cost carriers are certainly part of that approach. Funding will also support both international and domestic cooperative aviation marketing campaigns, which will stimulate demand on existing routes and further grow the value of domestic and international visitation.
The territory government, through Visit Canberra, has contributed $100,000 to participate in Tourism Australia’s $10 million global campaign—Restaurant Australia—alongside all states and territories. Visit Canberra is working with Tourism Australia, five local Restaurant Australia ambassadors and the local food and wine industry to raise awareness about our region’s unique food and wine offering within our priority markets, including Singapore, New Zealand, South-East Asia and China. Investment in the campaign is an important step in increasing collaboration with Tourism Australia ahead of cooperative marketing activity that will occur in support of direct international air services.
It is disappointing that there is no longer a domestic focus to Tourism Australia’s activities. That is regrettable. It is a disappointment that, following the change of government, any domestic focus has been removed from Tourism Australia, given that 70 per cent of national tourism is domestic. In the ACT’s context, it is even higher because we do not have direct international flights at this time. However, we continue to work positively with Tourism Australia in the areas that they are allowed to operate in, and that is internationally at this point in time, and we are seeing good results from our cooperative marketing.
The latest figures from the national visitor survey and international visitor survey have been released by Tourism Research Australia. These figures relate to the year ending June 2014 and they cover key visitor segments, including holiday travel, business travel and travel to visit friends and relatives.
In terms of domestic overnight visitation to the territory during this period, the key findings were that we received over two million domestic overnight visitors. This was down a little from the previous year, which included obviously the big elements of the centenary year, but over two million domestic overnight visitors is well in advance of what we had been receiving in previous years through this century; indeed in the nineties and eighties we never got anywhere near that.
There were 5.21 million domestic visitor nights. The holiday sector performed strongly, with visitor numbers up nine per cent and visitor nights up six per cent. What we saw particularly in the centenary year was a very strong push from Canberrans to invite their friends and relatives to the city, which was fantastic and boosted the tourism numbers, but the legacy from the centenary year is that the numbers of those who visit independently, who are not coming to see friends and relatives, have continued to grow in 2014, and that is encouraging.
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