Covid 19 & Queensland Tourism

It's quite astounding, the audacity of the Labor Party, when it comes to criticising the federal government on support for the tourism industry and support for the Australian economy as a whole. This package announced last week by the Morrison government of $1.2 billion is just a drop in the ocean compared to what we have spent overall. It's interesting that this time last week I was up in Cairns—I spent a week up in North Queensland—and the Palaszczuk government announced $200 vouchers just for the city of Cairns. Cairns is all Labor held state seats. Did we come out and accuse the state Labor government of pork-barrelling or anything like that? No, absolutely not. All we happened to point out was that, while the state government was sticking a whopping $3 million into the economy of Cairns, we had in the last 12 months injected over $800 million into the city of Cairns. That's over 25 times more than what the state Labor government is going to be doing over the next few months. So while the Labor Party is sitting here and saying the federal government is putting the tourist sector at risk it's not true at all.

It's worth noting that, if industry has been impacted, it's been by the inconsistencies displayed by the state governments, especially the state Labor governments. In the main, it's been the state Labor governments—the three big ones of Victoria, Queensland and WA—who've kept their borders closed and who've kept flip-flopping as to when borders are open and when borders are closed. It was interesting that, just at the start of this year, I got an enormous amount of feedback. I got trolled big-time by the Labor trolls and the digital lynch mob on social media. But late last year we had the chief medical officer of Queensland come out and say: 'We don't need to lock down again. We've got this under control.' We went for 130 days with no cases and then we had just one case in quarantine—so the source of it was known—and what did the Queensland Premier do? At nine o'clock on Friday morning, she came out and said she was going to lock down the city of Brisbane, over two million people, at five o'clock that afternoon. Thousands of workers in the hospitality industry were directly impacted by that. We have to remember that this was the first week back this year. A lot of businesses were restarting. They were going to make a fresh start in a new year. They got to Friday and the first weekend of the year and what happened? The state Labor government shut down Brisbane, resulting in thousands and, I suspect, millions of dollars in losses for the hospitality industry.

We were talking about the aviation sector. We had the CEO of Virgin come out and call for the state governments to have a consistent framework in regard to (1) border closures and (2) the restrictions on hospitality venues across the country. I also have a very good friend of mine who is a leading Australian musician who has personally called me and asked for some consistency in the restrictions across the states. He had a gig to play in Adelaide. I got a call from him on the weekend, going back a few weeks. He had a gig to play in Adelaide. South Australia shut the border with Victoria again and, suddenly, he was short a bass player. The event was all booked and then he had to ring around and try to find someone to come and play at that event. This the sort of inconsistency that is leading to a lack of confidence in the hospitality sector and the tourism sector in opening up...

Read the full speech at: https://www.gerardrennick.com.au/tourism-covid-19/