18/08/2006 No Mystery In Tourism Crash

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At a meeting this week in Adelaide the State's Tourism Ministers agreed on two points:

Domestic tourism has been in decline for the last 10-15 years
The States need to do more to overcome the slump in the domestic tourism market!

BUT THEY WILL JUST WASTE MORE TAXPAYERS MONEY AND FAIL BECAUSE THEY WILL NOT ADDRESS THE REAL ISSUE:

EXTREMIST ENVIRONMENTAL POLICIES, ADOPTED IN RETURN FOR GREEN VOTING PREFERENCES, ARE DECIMATING DOMESTIC TOURISM.

Basic access to the natural environment such as National Parks, Wilderness Areas and other Crown Land has become prohibitively expensive, fraught with complicated and draconian access rules and regulations, physically difficult or impossible and generally made as unpleasant as possible or in many cases simply banned! Traditional holiday activities such as camping or horse riding or even cycling are banned activities in much of the ~10 million hectares managed by NSW National Parks. Other popular activities such as trout fishing, kayaking and bushwalking usually require vehicular access but this has become impossible as the vast majority of roads and trails accessing rivers and isolated areas have been closed.

The single biggest domestic tourism industry is fishing (worth in excess of $1billion in NSW alone) and yet every State Labor government is hell bent on destroying this industry as part of the preference deals with Green extremists. The implementation of completely unscientific and unnecessary "no take zones" and Marine Parks will destroy the recreational and commercial fishing industries on the NSW coast and take whole towns with them as tourists and businesses continue to go overseas. Grahame Turk, the managing-director of NSW's biggest seafood market, The Sydney Fish Market, echoed the sentiment this week with the following comments:

"... the creation of a new marine park on the far south coast will be a further blow to fresh fish supplies."

"... if the Government creates "no-take" zones in the Batemans Marine Park, high quality supplies will be seriously depleted and the run-on effects will be disastrous."