Helen Haines (Indi, Independent) Share this | Hansard source

The Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Amendment (Coronavirus Economic Response Package) Bill 2020 waives the charges for tourism operators in the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park. For an industry that's taken a battering in recent months, this is a good and sensible move. It shows a willingness from the government to provide retrospective support to tourism businesses that have been impacted by the coronavirus shutdown. But to me it raises a question: why is it that the government has acted so quickly to provide specific support for tourism in Queensland, impacted by COVID-19, but has been so slow in providing support to tourism businesses affected by the bushfires several months before the pandemic hit?

It was back on 19 January that the government announced a $76 million package to support tourism in bushfire affected areas. That'll be six months ago next week, and so far, beyond that announcement, very little seems to have actually happened. On the National Bushfire Recovery Agency website right now it says that just seven per cent of this money has been spent. That's $5.3 million. When I spoke in parliament last week about this issue I noted that back then, just a couple of days ago, the NBRA website referred to a domestic tourism campaign called Live From Aus. This is a campaign totally unrelated to bushfires. The Live From Aus campaign features, for instance, ads about brekkie bowls from a chef on Bondi Beach, golf courses in the bayside Melbourne suburbs and underwater Great Barrier Reef tours. Now, as far as I know, neither Bondi Beach nor Melbourne's bayside suburbs were hit in the bushfires. And whilst we all know that the reef is boiling, I truly doubt that it was ever on fire.

These are all worthy causes, and obviously coronavirus has hit tourism in all these places, and we should be investing in tourism in all parts of Australia—undeniably. I checked again this morning, and it appears that the NBRA has now scrubbed all reference to the Live From Aus campaign. When I asked the NBRA, they assured me that none of the bushfire funding is going to Live From Aus. I have a really good working relationship with the NBRA and its commissioner, Andrew Colvin, who I believe is committed to a speedy and robust recovery. I really value working with Mr Colvin and his team, and I'm really pleased that the reference to Live From Aus has now been removed.

The NBRA has advised me that most of the $5.3 million already spent was for a domestic campaign that ran in early 2020 promoting domestic tourism for bushfire affected areas before COVID-19 restrictions and for the regional tourism grants program. But no details have been made publicly available, or privately available, about what that domestic campaign was or where these grants have actually gone. And now here we are, six months down the track from the bushfires—six months after the Prime Minister announced a tourism package—and not only has barely anything been done but there is no clarity on how the remaining 93 per cent of the money will be spent, and the NBRA website itself has been sending confusing messages about what the money is for.

It's all well and good that the government is writing bills to support tourism in Queensland, but for me it raises some really obvious questions. How about following through on the promise to bushfire affected tourism, too? Why was the NBRA connecting the $76 million allocated for bushfires with a domestic tourism campaign unrelated to bushfires? Of the $5.3 million that has been spent on a now redundant campaign and a small grants program, where exactly has this money gone? Most importantly, when will struggling tourism businesses actually receive the investment the government promised?

It might be helpful to put some facts around why we need to support the tourism sector in bushfire affected regions. Tourism North East just produced the results of some research they did into the impact of the double whammy of bushfires and COVID-19 on the tourism industry in north-east Victoria. Over the past six months we lost up to 1.6 million visitor nights. We lost up to $640 million in tourism expenditure. As a result, up to 6,400 jobs were disrupted or lost. Over 80 per cent of businesses have lost three quarters of their revenue. This is a sector which provides 20 per cent of our regional GDP in the north-east and 21 per cent of our jobs. One fifth of our economy has been entirely smashed. Over half a billion dollars has been lost from small businesses just in our part of regional Victoria alone. The same will be true for Gippsland, the Sapphire Coast, the Central Coast, the Southern Highlands and Kangaroo Island, but throughout it all just $5.3 million of the $76 million promised to these regions has been spent.

The research from Tourism North East showed that overwhelmingly the thing that tourism operators want to get back on their feet is support to encourage people back. That means a marketing campaign focused squarely on bushfire affected areas. That means grants for individual businesses to develop their own online presence. It means funding for regional tourism bodies to develop the digital infrastructure to connect them to potential visitor markets. It means taking the $76 million that was promised and actually doing something with it—not announcements but actions. When he launched the Bushfire tourism conservation scheme, the Prime Minister said it would:

… tap into the Australian desire to contribute to the recovery effort by encouraging Aussies to holiday in Australia and provide support to affected communities and regions.

This is the Prime Minister who was the CEO of Tourism Australia. This is the man who invented the 'Where the bloody hell are you?' Well, I'm asking: where the bloody hell is the money? If there's one thing he should understand, it's tourism marketing.

The NBRA should be developing and promoting a domestic tourism campaign focused on bushfire affected communities—that is, places like Beechworth and Mansfield, not Bondi and Melbourne. With the 93 per cent of funding sitting there, we need a tourism campaign focused on Bega, Eden, Batemans Bay and Mallacoota and of course the many beautiful towns and regions in my electorate of Indi. Of this funding, part should be going to local tourism bodies to ensure that local ideas tourism gets a guernsey.

Tourism North East has developed a pitch for a $750,000 digital commerce platform that would build resilience of local tourism businesses across Indi by helping them connect with customers. This is exactly the kind of long-term investment we should be using this money for.

This weekend the major parties were tousling over Eden-Monaro. It shouldn't take a by-election to sharpen anybody's focus on the bushfires we experienced this summer and it should not take a by-election to focus the attention on bushfire recovery, but perhaps the by-election could sharpen the government's focus on this particular issue and prompt them to announce their plans for the spending of the $76 million for bushfire tourism. There should be specific marketing for specific bushfire regions. There should be—

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