Anthony Albanese (Grayndler, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Infrastructure and Transport) Share this | Hansard source

The worst fears have been realised when straight after the election the government failed to appoint a tourism minister. The fact is that since then we saw in the budget the worst fears realised—all of the tourism grants being cut including round 2 of the Tourism Industry Regional Development Fund. This left regional tourism operators in the lurch. Some 450 tourism businesses had applied with matching funding and this meant that that private investment was also lost. They even tried to cut grants that had already been announced such as the TQUAL grants that had been announced in 2013. At the same time, the parliamentary secretary, the member for Paterson, was happy to pose with pictures over the internet at Labor government-funded tourism projects that his government had tried to axe.

We also saw broken promises to increase Tourism Australia funding. We saw budget trickery in this budget with the rolling of the Asian Marketing Fund into Tourism Australia funding to make it look like there were no cuts. We have also seen the axing of the Survey of Tourist Accommodation and we have seen the dumping of domestic marketing on the states and territories. This is particularly important for the regional tourism sector. Despite domestic travel being 70 per cent of the sector, the Queensland budget slashed that figure by some 20 per cent.

We have also seen job cuts at Tourism Research Australia. The problem with this government is that they have not prioritised tourism. It has just been a political opportunity. As an example of that, I ask the minister to respond to the so-called Cadbury tourism grant. This was a grant where tourism was not mentioned in the original statement and some nine months after the election in the Senate estimates process, Bruce Gosper, the CEO of Austrade, said, 'In respect of the proposal for funding for Cadbury factory, that is something that we are still dealing with. We are waiting for a business plan from Cadbury so that we can take that forward.' How is it that in a budget that has cuts to health, education and foreign aid, we see $16 billion allocated for a project that does not have a business plan presented to the government from Cadbury? When will that business plan be presented? Will it be made public and transparent and when will this grant actually occur?

This stands in stark contrast to the fact that regional tourism operators including those in Tasmania have been left behind by the cutting of the Tourism Industry Regional Development Fund. How does the minister justify the $16 million grant for an application that never got put forward before the former government and compared that—or it was not an application either for the Tourism Industry Regional Development Fund—while at the same time they are making these cuts in this area?

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