PUBLISHER’S WORD
Beam me up Scotty
O
ur visitor economy is booming with the Federal Government’s
ambitious target of doubling overnight domestic and
international visitor expenditure to more than $115 billion by 2020
looking highly achievable, especially with the latest figures showing
China is on the cusp of overtaking New Zealand as our number one
overseas market.
So you have to scratch your head when team Turnbull seems to
shoot itself in the foot in the latest federal budget pulling a $35
million rug out from under Tourism Australia over the next four
years. Maybe they don’t understand that unlike iron ore and gold,
overseas visitors aren’t simply waiting to be extracted. They can
exercise choice and simply go somewhere else if we don’t make a
compelling case for spending their hard earned and jumping on a plane to head here.
Repeated calls for a national convention bid fund also fell on Treasurer Scott Morrison’s
apparently deaf ears. The AACB among others has been pitching a case for making this a
priority, given we are not competing on an even global playing field when it comes to bidding
for international conferences. And given the high spending nature of business events visitors
compared with leisure visitors, the investment would pay dividends.
All that bad news was compounded by another recent decision from the Government to
scrap 457 visas in favour of two new visas for temporary overseas workers, with the caveat
of stricter guidelines. Australia is transitioning from a resource led economy to a service one,
and any impact on the ability of the all the myriad of service providers to staff themselves is
going to have dire consequences for our ability to lure those all-important overseas visitors.
Just ask Aaron Shaw, who runs the highly successful Sydney Seaplanes experience. He relies
on overseas pilots to staff his expanding fleet of seaplanes, which are becoming a big hit
with incentive groups. Come next year he’s wondering how he is going to fill those highly
specialised roles. You can read more about Aaron’s success story on page 28.
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THIS ISSUE’S TOP STORY
After years of talking up Adelaide’s capacity as a major
player for large international conventions the stars
have finally aligned, with the city set to welcome both
its first mega-incentive group and major international
convention. See the full story on page 10.
4 Convention & Incentive Mark