Tourism

Mr TEAGUE (Heysen) (14:13): My question is to the Premier. Can the Premier update the house on how the Marshall Liberal government is supporting tourism businesses to get back up and running?

The Hon. S.S. MARSHALL (Dunstan—Premier) (14:14): That is an excellent question. We are doing a lot of work to support the tourism sector; it is a vitally important sector here in South Australia. One thing which I would like to update the house on is how well South Australia did in 2019; in fact, we have just seen some figures which showed more than an 8 per cent increase in tourism in South Australia during 2019, and a 4 per cent increase in the number of people employed, up to 41,000 people.

We said when we put out our sector plan for the visitor economy, which was sitting when we published that plan at $7.6 billion, that we wanted to get to $12.8 billion by 2030. As of the end of December, we were already at $8.1 billion, so making great progress with an 8 per cent increase in 2019.

Can I say, 2020 hasn't been so kind to the tourism sector in South Australia. We know that devastating bushfires, which began on 20 December last year and burned in South Australia in various places, in particular on Kangaroo Island and in the Adelaide Hills, had a devastating effect on our tourism sector and also the way consumers perceived Australia from international markets. Nevertheless, we were very quick to get out with a #BookThemOut campaign to support those operators to drive dollars back to those areas as quickly as possible. You can imagine how devastating it was then only a few weeks later to be in the midst of this global coronavirus pandemic. It has been a major hit to this sector.

We moved very quickly in this sector to put $5.7 million on the table to help those communities survive this period of time and come out the other side stronger than before. We put money into regional tourism associations. We put money into different events to try to help them cope with some of their cancellation costs.

We also put money into the small business sector of the tourism industry, and in particular provided them with access to grants, access to financial advice and also advice on how they could digitise their business. In fact, with our early calls in terms of those financial seminars and digital economy seminars, they were oversubscribed and had to be extended.

In addition to that, of course, we have given all small businesses in South Australia access to the $10,000 grant in South Australia, which is now closed off but has been enormously popular. More than $13 million has already been paid out and many tens of millions of dollars are still to come on that. That has really provided many small businesses who are dependent on cash coming in to pay last month's bills an absolute lifeline, as has the federal government's JobKeeper program.

There are still some very tough months ahead. One of the things that we did early was to make sure that we could open up for intrastate travel as quickly as possible—we were the first state in Australia do that—and also to make sure that what we could do would be to open up for caravanning and camping. I know that there have been some fantastic bookings for this long weekend.

We have also now launched a $1.5 million Welcome Back strategy, the campaign which I know is going to drive intrastate travel. We are looking forward to better times ahead, but certainly the start of 2020 has been a tough time, but it's very much being supported by this government trying to enable people to get back on their feet and come out the other side stronger than before.