Lisa Singh (Tasmania, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary to the Shadow Attorney General) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to draw the Senate's attention to an exciting opportunity that has the potential to attract more tourists and create sustainable jobs in my home state of Tasmania. Perhaps most importantly this project has the potential to help heal divisions and unite traditional Tasmanians adversaries. In the modern economy, I firmly believe Tasmania's future lies in its precious natural advantages. Our ability to employ our people, fund vital services and maintain good standards is ever more dependent on three key things: our ability to become a world leader in producing clean renewable energy; our ability to innovate and create globally coveted produce from our climate, soils and waterways; and our ability to attract more visitors to come and spend more money sampling Tasmania's beauty. So imagine a project that genuinely has the environmental, social and economic credibility to unite all sides. I believe the infrastructure upgrade currently proposed for Cradle Mountain is that project.

Cradle Mountain is part of the Tasmanian Wilderness World Heritage Area, one of the most special places on earth. It is a place of ancient rainforests found nowhere else on earth, with ancient alpine species such as King Billy pine. It is host to precious wildlife. It is a place of incredible Aboriginal heritage and stunning scenery around Lake St Clair and Dove Lake. Cradle Mountain has become an iconic Tasmanian symbol. Lonely Planet has ranked Cradle Mountain as the world's 32nd best visitor experience. In Australia, only the Great Barrier Reef and MONA outrank it. It rates ahead of both Uluru and Kakadu National Park.

However, Cradle Mountain's tourism infrastructure is run-down and needs significant improvement. Tourism demand is moving well beyond what the current infrastructure can handle. In particular, disability access to the mountain is very poor. As things stand, the access road will have to be widened and upgraded to carry bigger buses within about 12 months. In turn, those buses will create more pollution and wear and tear on the local environment. Compared to widening the road and bringing in more and bigger vehicles, the Cradle Mountain master plan proposal highlights a sustainable alternative that will remove most vehicles from the sensitive mountain area altogether and, instead, provide visitor access, including disability access, via a low-impact, world's-best-practice cableway stretching 7.2 kilometres up the mountain. This will also help to attract an extra 60,000 tourists a year to Cradle Mountain, currently averaging 200,000 visitors each year. The extra visitation would be possible because the cableway will provide all-weather access all year around, instead of relying on the access road staying open.

The project will create almost 150 full-time jobs in construction and more than 110 full-time jobs in operation in a region that particularly needs sustainable jobs. It will create market potential for about 200 extra accommodation rooms in the Cradle Mountain area. It will provide low-impact shelter pods around Dove Lake and create a new wilderness village that consolidates visitor parking and retail outside of the national park, removing the ugly Dove Lake car park, which is currently among the first things visitors actually see from the top of Cradle Mountain. This master plan project will save Tasmanian taxpayers up to $40 million in recurrent costs over the life of the project. Most crucially, it will help to protect the precious Cradle Mountain environment and reduce the carbon footprint.

In contrast, doing nothing will actually see that environment degraded over time. But, unfortunately, in tonight's budget that is exactly what the Turnbull government has gone with—the doing-nothing approach for tourism in Tasmania and the Cradle Mountain master plan. That is very much a shame for Tasmania, for Tasmanian jobs, for the Tasmanian people and, most importantly, for the Tasmanian brand—which, as I said, Lonely Planet rates so highly. This is a $l00 million public-private project being actively championed by the Tourism Industry Council Tasmania, the Parks and Wildlife Service, the Cradle Coast Authority and all nine Cradle Coast councils. The Commonwealth government could have made this happen; instead, it has chosen to do nothing. In the meantime, it is happy to continue to invest in Kakadu National Park but do virtually nothing for Cradle Mountain. Where does this stack up? Where is the government in standing up for Tasmania? It is doing nothing in this budget tonight.