Martin Ferguson (Batman, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Transport, Roads and Tourism) Share this | Hansard source

On behalf of the opposition and as the shadow minister for transport, I advise that Labor supports the Tourism Australia Amendment Bill 2007. We support it because it implements the recommendations resulting from the 2006 Uhrig review relating to corporate governance arrangements for Tourism Australia. We all understand that tourism is vital to Australia. This goes to the framework and the national responsibility to work with state and territory governments and local communities to do everything to maintain tourism as a viable industry in Australia that creates jobs and export opportunities, whilst also enabling Australians a wonderful opportunity to have a holiday.

When you think about it, it is hard to imagine life without tourism in Australia, the so-called ‘land of the long weekend’. Bustling city centres, vacant white-sand beaches, lush tropical rainforests and sunburnt sweeping plains—that is the international understanding of what is available in Australia but, unfortunately, statistics now indicate that too few Australians are taking a holiday. One of the challenges to business in Australia is to better manage their business and to facilitate people to take holidays on a regular basis. This would also be smart for business, because as wages go up their own liabilities in terms of accumulation of annual leave and long service leave go through the roof.

So in addressing this bill today, I also challenge Australian industry to start managing their businesses better. They can reduce their liabilities whilst also facilitating their employees to have a better opportunity to perform their duties at work by actually having a break from work. That is a challenge to the Australian community for the foreseeable future.

I also note that, posed in historic terms, officially tourism is a relatively new industry. The terms ‘tourism’ and ‘tourist’ were first coined globally about 70 years ago, in 1937, by the League of Nations and referred to the act of people travelling abroad for more than 24 hours. They had not heard of domestic tourism in those days. Historically, however, we know that for centuries the wealthy in our societies have always travelled. The reason is that they sought to explore distant parts of the world, to see great buildings, experience new cultures and to taste new cuisine. Since the time of the Roman republic, places such as the luxurious and fashionable resort of Baiae were popular with the rich.

In Australia, the history is perhaps even more recent. The industry finally gained formal recognition in 1966 when the Holt government appointed the late Don Chipp as the first minister for tourism activities. A year later the Australian Tourism Commission was established through the allocation of $1.5 million of funding. If only it was so cheap these days in terms of the call on the taxpayer’s purse.

More seriously, in just over 40 years the industry has grown substantially in every conceivable sense. The advent of technological developments, particularly in transport, has made it easier than ever for people to move from one destination to the next and the emergence of low-cost carriers in the aviation industry in particular have removed financial barriers that previously limited tourism to the wealthy. More recently, with the advent of e-commerce, tourism products have become one of the most traded items on the internet—and that is where Tourism Australia has concentrated its activities, with a current advertising campaign internationally trying to attract hits on the net to encourage people to come to Australia.

Further, every year more and more destination choices are presented to the global traveller as countries recognise the huge economic and social benefit of a robust tourism sector. It has become an extremely popular global activity and each year, according to the World Tourism Organisation, almost 700 million tourists travel the globe. That is a huge number of people travelling around the globe at any point in time. Others peg the number of annual tourism travellers as high as 803 million a year.

While the size of the growth may be in dispute, what is not is that the sector is rapidly growing. Estimates predict that by 2020, which is only a decade away, the number of people travelling each year through tourism will reach a huge 1.6 billion people—this is almost the entire current population of China—who will be more than ever on the move looking for new experiences. It also, unfortunately, represents a huge challenge to Australia, because recent indications are that we are going backwards in some of these key markets, such as Japan. We have to try to make sure that we have a program in place which enables us to get our share of that burgeoning growth in tourism. I say that because, of these 1.6 billion travellers, 378 million will be long-haul travellers, which is of significant note to Australia, a country considered globally as a long-haul destination.

It also raises huge challenges in handling the debate about climate change, because there are some who want to impose huge penalties on the airline industry for greenhouse emissions and who would require the industry to pay more with respect to their operations. These things have to be handled very sensitively and in a pragmatic and proper way because, if this debate goes wrong for aviation, Australia will be the big loser because of our need to encourage and attract long-haul fliers. It is about time that some of these people paid more attention to the responsibilities of Airservices Australia to manage flight paths and the departures and arrivals at airports, because you can do more in the climate change fight by introducing greater efficiencies there.

I also note that the aviation industry has started to respond to the huge cost impost of recent increases in the price of oil with better management and technological change. So there is potentially a multifaceted approach to resolving this climate change debate for the viability of the aviation industry, rather than simply imposing new costs on the industry as part of the greenhouse debate. I think that is important. Global tourists have traditionally held back on long-haul travel as it can prove cost prohibitive but also requires more time. The last thing we need is to unnecessarily burden the industry with huge cost difficulties arising from the greenhouse debate. You cannot just duck over to Australia from London the way you can to Paris or to Amsterdam. It is, therefore, pleasing to see forecasts for long-haul travel growing slightly faster than intraregional travel. It is estimated its share will increase from 18 per cent in 1995 to 24 per cent by 2020.

Global forecasts present further positive news for Australia. The South-East Asia and the Pacific region, which encompasses Australia, will be the second largest receiving region with growth forecast to increase by over five per cent, compared to the world average of 4.1 per cent. The growth opportunities are there, but we as a nation have to grab hold of them. This growth is largely due to two reasons: the emergence of new markets in Asia and particularly in South-East Asia; and, more importantly, the fall in Europe’s popularity from 60 per cent to 46 per cent of the market.

These technological and transport advances have kept pace with rapidly changing consumer tastes. There are more tourists now than ever before and they have the levels of disposable income that mean they can travel. They are better educated and have more sophisticated demands. The old ‘sun, sea and sand’ mass market has fragmented as travellers seek out active experiences that engage with local culture. It is a far more sophisticated and demanding market that Australia has to confront. This effectively means that there has been a growth in niche markets catering for special interests or activities, including growth in destination hotels, as people seize upon opportunities to do something unique that is off the tourism track. This has led to a change in the way nations and regions market their tourism. Previously held notions have been abandoned that boxed travellers into the categories of countries of origin, mode of travel and style, whether it be backpackers, organised tours or self-drive. The traveller’s motivation and their travel lifestyle are now the key defining characteristics—attributes that cross national borders and create new marketing segments. Sometimes the attributes are universal, but not always. Some travellers cannot help but be influenced by their own cultural habits.

This is perhaps what we have seen with Tourism Australia’s $180 million global campaign ‘Where the Bloody Hell Are You?’ launched in February of last year—the campaign that, incidentally, appears to have undergone an unannounced name change to become a ‘Uniquely Australian Invitation’ in the light of criticism of such a controversial tag line.

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