CRUISE SHIPS

Dr CLOSE (Port Adelaide) (14:58): My question is to the Minister for Tourism. Can the minister inform the house about the upcoming cruise ship season and how the government is working to attract more cruise ships to our state?

The Hon. L.W.K. BIGNELL (Mawson—Minister for Tourism, Minister for Recreation and Sport) (14:58): I want to thank the member for Port Adelaide for that question. Of course, the Port Adelaide passenger terminal at Outer Harbor is in the member for Port Adelaide's electorate and it is a great welcoming place for thousands of people who come from around Australia and around the world to visit Adelaide.

The state government has recently joined with Flinders Ports with a $170,000 investment in a new gangway which will not only decrease the amount of time it will take to get people on and off the ships but will also enable South Australia to become a home port, so we will have more cruises starting at Port Adelaide that can then go to our regional areas.

In this most recent cruise season, we welcomed 16 cruises to South Australian waters and next year I am pleased to say we already have 31 booked in, so we are seeing a very big increase. In the following year, we have 35 cruise ships booked in, so some great news in the cruising sector for South Australia.

One thing that is really advancing is the stop-offs in regional South Australia, and we are going to see eight on Kangaroo Island next cruising season. Each time a ship calls into Kangaroo Island, a visit is worth $100,000 direct into that economy. We are also pleased to say that, for the first time, we will have a cruise ship visit Robe, and so for people on the Limestone Coast, Coonawarra and other surrounding areas, passengers will be getting off the ships and seeing the wonderful things that the Limestone Coast has to offer.

Port Lincoln is also going to be paying host to cruise ships in the upcoming season. It is great to see the regional economies benefiting. The South Australian Tourism Commission has been out conducting workshops in those regional areas as well as in the Adelaide Hills, the Barossa Valley and McLaren Vale, because we don't want people to pull up at Port Adelaide and spend all their time on the ship. We actually want them to get out and really savour the great things about South Australia.

We know that, if they go to the Barossa Valley, McLaren Vale or the Adelaide Hills and they have a wine there, when they go back home to Germany, the US, the UK, or wherever they are from, when they see a Barossa or McLaren Vale wine in the wineshop, they will reach for that first because it will bring back the wonderful experience that they had. The 16 visits that we had from cruise ships to South Australia in this most recent cruising season added $9 million to our state's economy, and that is fantastic when people come from interstate and overseas and bring their money and put it into our economy. It reduces the impact on taxpayers here in South Australia and it is why tourism is so important.

I am really pleased that the cruise sector is already ahead in all of our targets that we have set in recent years. The forward projections already have us well ahead in those projections as we try to grow the South Australian tourism industry from a $5 billion industry to an $8 billion industry by 2020. So we will continue to work with cruise ship operators from around the world to really sell not only the great port facilities that we have throughout South Australia but also the wonderful experiences that we have, and anyone who has been up to Hahndorf when the ships are in, and spoken to people off these cruise ships, will know that people really enjoy coming to South Australia.