Steven Ciobo (Moncrieff, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

those people who would take the opportunity to actually employ staff. It is quite pathetic to hear Labor Party members yelling out: ‘Work Choices, Work Choices.’ The truth is that, with respect to Australia’s tourism industry, Work Choices never did to the potential of young Australians what the Labor Party is doing to them now. To all of those businesses that no longer open on a Sunday, to all those businesses that now close their doors early during the week, to all those businesses that have fewer staff on the books because of the penalty rates they have to pay, sure, the Labor Party can say to those who still have a job: ‘We’ve looked after you.’ But there are now so many more people who simply do not have a job.

I have someone in my own electorate who is part of the tourism industry. He is a cafe owner—he is actually an immigrant—who used to open seven days a week, but who now closes on Sundays because, as he said to me, it is simply uneconomic for him to open as a direct consequence of the new penalty rates. In that one cafe, in my electorate, six staff have lost their employment on a Sunday as a direct consequence of the new penalty rates. That is but one example. What is clear, though, is that this is a government which, when it comes to tourism policy, is just like a cork on the ocean, bobbing and blowing in each and every direction. It is not really the focus of the Minister for Tourism. He has been completely preoccupied for a number of years with the Resources and Energy portfolio. Perhaps that lay behind the decision of the current Gillard Labor government to have a quasi tourism minister in the form of the new outer ministry tourism minister.

In addition to this lack of actual policy direction when it comes to the tourism industry, we on this side of the House recognise a missed opportunity—a massive missed opportunity to invest more money into developing Australia’s tourism industry. The coalition took to the last election a tourism policy that actually would have seen the investment of an additional $100 million in Australia’s tourism industry, with a specific focus on business events tourism. That is the highest yielding part of the Australian tourism industry—a real job creator, a real export earner and a part of the tourism industry that Australia has a huge competitive advantage in. With the creation of the policy that we took to the last election and with the actual application of that policy, had we been in government, I have no doubt that we would have created thousands of jobs, created incentives for tens of thousands of additional tourists to come to this country and created a very high-yielding, generally longer term stay Australian tourism industry.

The simple inescapable reality is that members opposite are unable to actually stand and enunciate what Labor’s tourism policy is. For all intents and purposes, it has only been status quo. For a brief moment we had a lot of focus coming from the Labor Party about their long-term tourism strategy but, apart from the creation of a few interdepartmental committees and a couple of new committees that have been appointed by the minister, not a single dollar of funding has flowed as a result of the long-term tourism strategy. There have been no new initiatives with respect to the rollout beyond, as I said, the creation of some bodies and, as a consequence, the Australian tourism industry is poorer.

This has been, unfortunately, a very sad chapter of lost opportunity. It has been a sad chapter of a government that refuses to invest in one of the largest job creators and one of the principal export industries that our nation has. And, above all, this has been four long years of massive missed opportunity for Australia’s tourism industry to rise up, create employment, create export income and, for that reason, I support the motion. (Time expired)

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