Jess Walsh (Victoria, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

Over a million Australians are employed in our tourism industry, a sector which is critical for our economy as a whole and is especially important for those regional communities which rely almost entirely on tourism. We know that the sector has been doing it extremely hard because of COVID. This has real impacts for regional communities and also for the individuals, the families, the households who rely on the JobKeeper lifeline right now. While many sectors hit by COVID have begun to recover, tourism is different. It will continue to need help until domestic and international travel fully resume. JobKeeper has been absolutely vital for the sector, and that is exactly why the Labor Party argued so strongly for the JobKeeper program. But we still haven't seen a plan from the government for the good, secure jobs that are needed to replace JobKeeper.

In Victoria alone, it is estimated that over 300,000 jobs in tourism, transport and hospitality are at risk today without JobKeeper. It absolutely beggars belief that the government has announced a tourism package that will not protect jobs, that doesn't respond to the needs the industry itself has identified, that has been met with disappointment and confusion by tourism operators in regional communities, and that actually encourages Victorians to abandon their plans to travel to their own tourist towns and instead take a flight interstate. The Victorian tourism minister, Martin Pakula, has written to his federal counterpart asking that four extra destinations be included in the government's poorly targeted tourism package. Minister Pakula has been frank in saying, 'Somewhere in the Canberra bubble there seems to be a misunderstanding of how Victorian tourism works.' He went on to say, 'Regional and metropolitan tourism recovery is too important for it to be coloured by the electoral map.' Victoria has asked the federal tourism minister to include in the scheme Melbourne Airport as well as the regional airports in Mildura, Bendigo and Albury in New South Wales. Given the government's on-again, off-again naming of locations in this scheme, Victorians will have to watch closely to see whether their airports and towns make it onto the list, and indeed, if they do, whether they stay on the list.

Let's face it: this scheme is an absolute shambles and it has been a shambles from day one. The Deputy Prime Minister's shambolic interview over the weekend failed to reassure tourism operators, or anyone else for that matter, that the government has a plan to get local economies back on track. This scheme is a politicised vote-buying exercise. That is what it is. It is not a jobs plan. It is a politicised vote-buying scheme put forward by this government.

What Victorians want is a federal government that will actually support a plan for real recovery that will look after the people of Victoria and that will back the tourism operators and make sure local jobs are protected. Victorian regional communities are definitely doing it tough. They need a federal government that backs them up. The people in regions who rely on tourism need a real plan from this government. They absolutely deserve better from the government. There are just too many Victorians employed in this industry to let it fail under this shambolic government scheme.