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House of Assembly - Fifty-Second Parliament, Second Session (52-2)
2013-05-02 Daily Xml
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CHINA DELEGATION

The Hon. M.J. WRIGHT (Lee) (14:34): My question is to the Minister for Tourism. Can the minister inform the house on outcomes from his recent trip to China?

The Hon. L.W.K. BIGNELL (Mawson—Minister for Tourism, Minister for Recreation and Sport) (14:35): I thank the member for his question. I have recently returned from a trip to Hong Kong, Guangzhou, Shanghai and Beijing where we had a number of meetings and forums, lunches and dinners with tourism operators and airlines.

We signed two MOUs while I was over there; one, which the Premier touched upon on Tuesday, was to give eight koalas to Ocean Park Zoo in Hong Kong, where they will build a $5 million South Australian exhibit. The other MOU was with UnionPay, which is China's credit card. They have 700 million individual cardholders, with 3.5 billion credit cards. At the moment, the only way Chinese visitors to Australia can use those credit cards is if hotel accommodation or a restaurant or a shop has an NAB terminal.

By the end of June, the Commonwealth Bank will be on board as well, but we really need to push Westpac and ANZ to allow merchants to be able to offer these facilities, because there is a Chinese proverb that says, 'Spend frugally at home but spend generously when you are away.' Chinese people want to come here and spend their money, but at the moment they are limited in how much they can spend. They are allowed to bring the equivalent of $5,000 out of China to spend, but they are really limited and they want to spend big when they are here.

Places like Penfolds, for example, which is probably one of the best-known brand names from South Australia in China, and other wineries around South Australia cannot accept UnionPay. I will be writing to all the tourism operators to advise them that, if they are with NAB or the Commonwealth, by the end of June they should be advertising and putting the stickers up to promote the fact that UnionPay is available to Chinese tourists who are here.

Of course, we are trying to increase Chinese tourism numbers from 17,000 last year to 56,000 by 2020. That is a trebling of those figures; it is an increase in our economic activity from $110 million to $450 million. We are also trying to attract direct airline services from China, so we have spoken with China Eastern and China Southern, as well as to the existing airlines who have been so loyal to South Australia—Malaysia, Cathay and Singapore Airlines—so we had those discussions while we were over there.

I encourage anyone from either side of the chamber that, if you are going to China, we have some excellent contacts over there—and it is all about relationships. We would be happy to have representatives from Eyre Peninsula, from Clare, from the Barossa, from the Riverland, from the Limestone Coast, from the Murraylands—from all around South Australia. If you are heading over to China, please contact our office and we can set you up with some contacts to help grow those relationships because it is very important that, as China grows towards 100 million Chinese tourists leaving China each year to travel somewhere overseas, we get our fair share of that market.

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