Portfolio Media

LTTS: Unfunded Spin and More Bureaucracy

15 December 2009

After two years of talk of a long-term tourism “strategy”, Tourism Minister Martin Ferguson has today come up with a classic piece of Rudd Government spin comprising re-announcements, weasel words and disappointment for the 500,000 Australians employed in the tourism sector.

Shadow Tourism Minister Steven Ciobo said Minister Ferguson today announced a tourism “strategy” which amounted to nothing more than hollow words, no new funding and more bureaucracy.

“True to Rudd Government form, the report is stacked full of “facilitations” and “frameworks”, as well as “issue-specific working groups” and “problem-solving mandates”, but where is the tangible support of an industry contributing $89 billion to the economy" This is a classic piece of Rudd-speak and verbal varnish.

“This is a strategy which has taken two years to formulate and is the Government’s response to the exhaustive Jackson Report. But what is it really doing to reinvigorate Australia’s tourism industry? If I were a tourism operator I’d be as mad as hell,” Mr Ciobo said.

“The Rudd Government’s standard template of focusing an industry around its own bureaucracies is not what the tourism sector needs. We need less red-tape, not more.

“Re-announcing Labor’s heavily slashed tourism grants may help the Minister’s media release factory, but it won’t fool the tourism industry and prevent it from seeing through the Rudd Government’s unfunded, long-term tourism “strategy”.

“And more than two years after Labor’s key election commitment of a National Tourism Accreditation scheme, we have still seen no scheme, just more talk of what might be.

“After more than two years at the helm and at one of the most challenging times for the industry, Minister Ferguson has come up with an unfunded and uninspiring strategy which must come as the biggest anticlimax for the industry since the Minister’s über-hyped Australia marketing brainchild last year.”