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House of Assembly - Fifty-Second Parliament, Second Session (52-2)
2013-06-05 Daily Xml
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INTERNATIONAL VISITORS

The Hon. M.J. WRIGHT (Lee) (14:56): My question is to the Minister for Tourism. Can the minister inform the house about the latest international visitor results for South Australia?

The Hon. L.W.K. BIGNELL (Mawson—Minister for Tourism, Minister for Recreation and Sport) (14:56): I thank the member for his question. There is more good news for South Australia today with the federal government announcing the tourism figures for the past 12 months, and I am pleased to say that South Australia attracted 357,000 international visitors in the 12 months to March 2013, which is 20,000 more visitors than we had during the 12 months to March 2012. That is an increase of 5.5 per cent, which is higher than the national average growth of 4.7 per cent.

International visitor nights have been growing since 2009. For the year ending March 2013, just under 10.4 million nights were spent in South Australia, which is an increase of almost 15 per cent on the previous year and more than double the national average growth of 7.1 per cent.

There are a lot of reasons for the fact that we are attracting more international visitors to South Australia. Adelaide Airport is the fastest growing capital city airport in Australia, with a growth of 23.5 per cent in the past 12 months. We now have 42 direct international flights into Adelaide each week, which is a big improvement on the 13 direct services that we had a decade ago. So we are delivering 10,212 seats into Adelaide each week.

As I have mentioned in this place before, we are continuing our discussions with other airlines as well and we are confident of getting more Asian airlines, particularly from China, into South Australia—flying direct into Adelaide—as soon as we can. The Emirates deal which has helped so much in growing these numbers took eight years to achieve, and we had some talks with China Eastern Airlines and China Southern Airlines in China about six weeks ago.

We are also looking after Malaysia Airlines, Cathay Pacific and Singapore Airlines as well, because they have been very loyal to our state for decades, and we need to make sure that we continue to work with them and help market Adelaide and South Australia into the catchments where they are trying to attract people to come down to Adelaide and to South Australia.

Meeting with Emirates yesterday, they are delighted with the success of their service reaching out to all those cities across Europe and bringing people from there, through Dubai into Adelaide. Their load figures have been very good, so it is no surprise that we have seen good figures up until March this year. I think the figures towards the end of this year, when we have a whole year of all of these extra flights, will be outstanding.

We had 17 cruise ships come to South Australia over the summer period. In the next season, it will grow from 16 this year, which was an outstanding year, to 31. So we will have 31 cruises next season. For the year after that, we are already booked for 36, so we are hoping that will grow even more, bringing even more international tourists to South Australia.

The important thing that we are doing there is that from next year we are getting the cruise ships directly into the regions as well, with visits to Port Lincoln, Kangaroo Island and Robe as well. There's nothing like a big boost to local economies than to have a whole shipful of people turn up and spend their hard earned.

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