Tourism Budget

The Hon. R.P. WORTLEY (15:02): I seek leave to make a brief explanation before asking the Minister for Trade, Tourism and Investment questions about South Australia's tourism sector?

Leave granted.

The Hon. R.P. WORTLEY: The latest round of tourism statistics from Tourism Research Australia show that South Australia is lagging behind national averages. Industry estimates that the value of tourism in South Australia is now $100 million down from the previous evaluation of the industry. The Marshall Liberal government has also cut $11 million from the tourism state budget and according to industry sources more cuts are to follow. While tourism and exports are struggling, minister Ridgway continues to take a keen interest in his own tourism, notably taking seven international trips overseas since the last election. My questions to the minister are:

1. Is the minister aware that the economic contribution of the tourism industry has gone down $100 million during his watch?

2. Has the minister advised the Treasurer of the potential negative economic consequences of any budget cuts to tourism?

3. Can the minister guarantee that there will be no more cuts to the tourism budget in the 2019-20 state budget?

The Hon. D.W. RIDGWAY (Minister for Trade, Tourism and Investment) (15:03): I thank the honourable member for his interest in the tourism sector. He rightly reports that the most recent figures show that the value of the tourism sector has fallen to $6.8 billion—three months earlier it was $6.9 billion. Interestingly, over the period from 2017 to 2018, a 12-month period, it is up from the $6.6 billion that it was back then. Obviously, there is always a bit of volatility in these particular figures—there are one-off events.

I have asked the Tourism Commission to interrogate those figures because we want the sector to continue growing. It has been growing reasonably well over recent years. We want to continue to see it growing. One of the factors that has been put to me is that one of the reasons that we may have seen a bit of a dip in December is the Ashes were here the year before and a lot of international visitors come for the Ashes, especially the English supporters. We are keeping a pretty close eye on it.

Of course, some of our international expenditure is currently at $1.1 billion, which is actually well ahead of what we need to meet our goal of $1.2 billion by the end of next year. We are looking at the 2020 target and these figures can be a little bit volatile, but we are still going reasonably well. Expenditure from China also shows impressive growth: it's up to $436 million and well within reach of our target of $450 million for our 2020 target. We have also seen interstate expenditure grow to a record high of $2.2 billion.

Certainly, there are always volatilities in these figures and no graph or sales figure or report is ever a continually smooth line. There will always be times where we see it go up and down a bit. Overall, regional South Australia is going particularly well. It recorded 4.1 million visits and 14.5 million visitor nights. That is a great result for our regions. Certainly, it is an important sector that continues to grow and one of the reasons that we have invested $3 million into the Tourism Commission's winter campaign: because it's an opportunity. We saw no other states marketing the winter.

We know that there are the Adelaide Hills, the Barossa, McLaren Vale, Clare Valley—and the Clare Valley has spectacular wine. Interestingly, we saw the shadow minister yesterday in another place saying it was just okay. Well, I think it is way better than just okay: it is world-class in Clare. So we are spending some money in the $3 million winter campaign, especially to try to push visitors into the Limestone Coast and some of our regions. The Winter Reds campaign that the Adelaide Hills Wine Association have every year is a perfect example of some of our regions that we want to try to showcase in the winter campaign. One of the companies that focuses quite well in the winter campaign is now booked, I think, until 2025. That is the amount of business that is being driven to the website.

Interestingly, during the week from 14 April to 20 April, we were up 30 per cent in visits to southaustralia.com, to 140,331. On Good Friday, visits were 28 per cent above the expected traffic levels for those days. We will see some volatility—we always will, that's the nature of the game we are in—but we are particularly committed to ensuring the ongoing success of this sector and with its 18,000 passionate and dedicated local tourism operators we will be continuing to make sure that we put marketing at the top of our list for the investment in tourism.

I am not going to be drawn by the honourable member. I am surprised it has taken until the third day of questions to start asking questions about the budget. I am not going to play the 'rule in, rule out, what's in the budget' game. The Treasurer was the Treasurer in a former a government. He knows the value of investing in tourism and will continue to invest. Members opposite can rest assured that the tourism sector will continue to grow, and we are on track to get to a target of $8 billion by 2020. We hope that we will have, at some point in the future, our 2030 target, which will then look to support that over the next decade and more to grow that sector to the maximum it can possibly be grown.