Page 3658 - Week 10 - Wednesday, 13 September 2017
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Next year we will also celebrate Reconciliation Day, assuming the bill passes the Assembly tomorrow. We will be working with the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander community, as well as the broader community, to construct some family-friendly celebrations for Reconciliation Day. It is important to recognise that it is an event for the wider community. Reconciliation is not just the business of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people but of all of us.
We have already seen that the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander community is capable of putting on fantastic family-friendly events during NAIDOC Week. For those who did not get to this year’s NAIDOC Week events, I would strongly recommend checking out the family day next year and some of the other events that occur during NAIDOC Week.
I want to finish by thanking the communities, organisations, individuals and volunteers that make each and every one of these events possible and who contribute so much to creating the inclusive city that we all love.
MR BARR (Kurrajong—Chief Minister, Treasurer, Minister for Economic Development and Minister for Tourism and Major Events) (4.12): I thank Mr Pettersson for moving this motion today and my colleagues for their contributions. We have heard, and it is a great thing to celebrate, that our city is currently experiencing a record number of domestic and international visitors. With this record number of visitors has come a record level of expenditure in our economy.
In the past 12 months we have seen the number of international visitors reach an all-time record high and, as we have heard, a near 10 per cent increase on the previous 12 months. Those international visitors injected an additional $115 million into the economy in the past 12 months, taking that total contribution to over half a billion dollars. Our domestic visitors continue to be the mainstay, though, of the ACT’s tourism market. To the end of March 2017 the territory welcomed 2.5 million overnight visitors, and these visitors contributed $1.572 billion to the territory economy.
I highlight these points to highlight the economic contribution that tourism makes to the ACT. With that in mind, our tourism 2020 strategy provides the framework to build programs and activities that will help achieve our 2020 goal of growing overnight expenditure to $2.5 billion. Currently, domestic and international overnight expenditure is worth $2.11 billion, so we are well on our way to achieving the $2.5 billion target by 2020.
The territory government continues to actively market Canberra to international visitors through VisitCanberra’s program of activities, including the Australian Tourism Exchange, travel trade and media engagement, and cooperative campaigns with travel agents and with Singapore Airlines. The “one good thing after another” marketing platform underpins VisitCanberra’s ongoing approach to marketing Canberra domestically and internationally. The premise of this campaign is very simple: there is no other destination that offers the diversity of tourism experiences so close together as our city.
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