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Legislative Council - Fifty-Second Parliament, Second Session (52-2)
2012-02-29 Daily Xml
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TOURISM COMMISSION

The Hon. D.W. RIDGWAY (Leader of the Opposition) (15:29): There were 2,223 people aboard the Titanic when she sank 600 kilometres off the aptly named Mistaken Point; 706 people survived. That was in 1912: exactly 100 years later in 2012 a ministerial reshuffle of the Tourism Commission does not absolve Gail Gago of incompetence any more than shuffling the deck chairs on the Titanic would absolve Captain Edward Smith for running into the iceberg.

This afternoon the board of the South Australian Tourism Commission is meeting at its King William Street headquarters, just a few hundred metres from where we stand. The board and the commission have been feeling the heat, and to mix metaphors its chief executive officer, Mr Ian Darbyshire, a Labor appointment and one in which I am told Kevin Foley had some cabinet input, has been left out in the cold. Why? Because this minister is disinterested in South Australia's $4.5 billion a year tourism industry or the fate of its thousands of operators and the thousands and thousands of international and national visitors we get each year, or the tens of millions of dollars they spend. She does not care about the level of intrastate tourism. She has not once met with the Tourism Commission's board and she, like Captain Smith, will go down—the minister with the ship of state.

It cannot be said that the Hon. Gail Gago was not warned about the impending shipwreck. Time after time the opposition has cautioned the minister about looming obstacles: the Visitor and Travel Centre's ill-considered move from King William Street to a Grenfell Street basement, the money lost on a surfing carnival—not that I am criticising the carnival or the effort of everyone associated with tourism on Kangaroo Island, but the minister's lack of oversight—and, of course, the delay in Tourism's regional guides, which are now so far out-of-date that if anyone followed their advice, they would still be standing in the wrong place on the wrong date waiting for the Tour Down Under, which will never pass.

Captain Smith had warnings, too, and chose to ignore them. His first warning reported 'bergs, growlers and field ice'. The next one said that a second ship had been 'passing icebergs and large quantities of field ice,' and there were many more, all wasted on officers of the deck. All the warnings about the tourism industry's lack of confidence in this minister have failed to divert minister Gago from her course to destruction.

The Titanic's final warning message was received just before midnight, but the Titanic's radio officer cut the signal off and tapped back, 'Shut up! Shut up!' That is what the minister has been howling at her critics. Yesterday, South Australians were insulted when she referred to questions about this fiasco as 'outrageous'. It is in Hansard. It is on the public record. Instead of changing course or setting new sights, she told her critics that they did not know what they were talking about and ploughed straight on at full speed.

We have seen this sort of insanity before. We saw it in the prelude to the State Bank collapse. My colleague in another place, Jennifer Cashmore, warned premier John Bannon and was told, 'Shut up! Shut up!' What happened in the State Bank collapse? A royal commission found the answer. The directors tried to blame the chief executive. That did not wash with the commissioner. He said that the board was culpable, but the commissioner did not stop there. He also assigned fault to the government, to Treasury and, ultimately, all the way to the top, to the office of the relevant minister, in this case, premier John Bannon.

The collapse of the State Tourism Commission's proper functionality also goes all the way to the top, to the Leader of the Government in this place, to the hapless, incompetent, ineffectual, inept, inexpert, useless Minister for Tourism. When asked yesterday how many months late the Shorts booklet would be, she said that it was none of her business, that it was an operational matter.

Can it be that the minister is unfamiliar with the concept of individual ministerial responsibility, a constitutional convention in governments using the Westminster system that a minister bears the ultimate responsibility for the actions of their ministry or department? The minister may well have to consider whether or not she should do the decent thing by this parliament, by the taxpayer, and by convention, and resign her commission.

Asked whether she still had confidence in the Chief Executive Officer of Tourism SA, Mr Ian Darbyshire, she answered that Mr Darbyshire had worked extremely hard in difficult circumstances and referred to him in glowing terms. She said:

He works hard, he works in a very diligent way, he is incredibly passionate about his commitment to tourism and he should be acknowledged for the work that he does.

Today, less than 24 hours later, the Tourism Commission's board is watching as minister Gago rearranges the deck chairs. Before the Titanic went down, distress rockets were fired every few minutes. One wireless operator suggested to his colleague that he should use the new SOS signal as it 'may be your last chance to send it'. It is time the minister fired the distress rockets. It is time the Premier responded to the SOS and sent in a rescue team, because this minister is drowning in a sea of her own inadequacy.

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