Tourism

Mr PICTON (Kaurna) (15:28): My question is to the Minister for Tourism. Minister, can you inform the house how many tourists from France come to South Australia, and what is being done to attract more?

The Hon. L.W.K. BIGNELL (Mawson—Minister for Agriculture, Food and Fisheries, Minister for Forests, Minister for Tourism, Minister for Recreation and Sport, Minister for Racing) (15:28): Merci. Bonjour. I thank the member for Kaurna for the question and I think your seat used to be known as Baudin—a French connection there. We get about 14,000 visitors from France each year and most of you will know, in regional areas, that they disperse out of Adelaide. A lot of them are young, sort of in the under 25 age group. They go out and do work in agricultural and tourism pursuits. You are likely to see them in the Riverland. I have seen four young pastry chefs up there and they had been out picking grapes. On Kangaroo Island we get a lot of them.

The member for Frome and I bumped into a group of French tourists out the front of the information building one day. It is great to have them coming here, but what we want to do now, with this renewed interest from France in South Australia, is to see how we can capitalise on getting even more tourists here and capitalise on our proud association and relationship between France and South Australia.

Of course, this week, the Australian Tourism Exchange is taking place on the Gold Coast. I was there with the head of Tourism Australia's European office, Denise von Wald, who is originally from South Australia, and we talked to her about ways in which we could increase our marketing into France and capitalise on the programs we have here.

We, of course, welcomed Qatar Airways for the first time into South Australia, bringing in their A350s—the only route anywhere in Australia that any airline is flying on. They have, through Doha, a connection to Paris. Singapore Airlines, Emirates and Cathay Pacific also have flights, via their hubs, from Paris into South Australia and we are going to work with them. We are going to put some more money into marketing South Australia to the French market.

In this year's budget, we put an extra $35 million into the tourism sector to grow our visitor economy. Our target is to increase it from $5.2 billion to $8 billion by 2020, and we want to create more jobs in the sector as well, so this commitment in the budget for $35 million contains $14 million that will be used for marketing South Australia to the world. I also want to thank Christian Prudhomme, the head of the Tour de France, and a very good friend of South Australia, who probably has the numbers of every important person in France in his mobile phone.

He plays a very important role, and he is very good friends with the defence minister, with whom the Premier spent time on his tour of Brittany, so I want to extend my thanks to Christian. He is going to allow us to promote the Tour Down Under—the biggest race outside Europe—during the Tour de France this year when, appropriately, stage 2 finishes in Cherbourg, which is where the submarines are built and where the big relationship between Adelaide and France is concentrated.