Tourism's long green miles

Queensland mining magnate, Clive Palmer, came up with a similarly grand plan for the now dated Hyatt Coolum Resort on the Sunshine Coast. Whatever you think of Clive, someone who says they’re prepared to throw ‘a couple of billion’ into redeveloping a tourism facility doesn’t come along every day. Not even once in a decade. Yet his proposal has it seems been greeted with the usual wall of non-committal platitudes, and promises of town planning reviews, environmental impact studies, open invitations to any NIMBYs to object and ultimately, to fail. Sorry Clive. I wish I could be more optimistic.

So even in places that are already heavily developed, opposition to tourism development is just as heated as it might be in undeveloped areas. If even letting some mountain bikes and horse riders re-enter our national parks draws criticism, what hope is there for developing new product for the industry state-wide.

Without new product, there are insufficient ‘new’ experiences to promote. Without new product, there are fewer new businesses with advertising budgets, which collectively do more than any state endorsed tourism campaign will ever do at taxpayer expense.

All of which perhaps explains why Australia, it seems, is a touch bored with the Queensland tourism proposition. It’s the same beaches, the same rainforests, and same theme parks, largely the same natural and man-made attractions we keep promoting, over and over again. Ad nauseum. The hotels are tired, the theme parks have a ‘been there done that’ flavour and the basic business infrastructure of the industry is in desperate need of recapitalisation and new product development.

Because, at the end of the day, there’s no ‘industry’ in a wide expanse of sandy beach. There’s no ‘industry’ in a rainforest. The ‘industry’ bit of ‘tourism industry’ means businesses which employ people to take money off tourists who need places to stay, to shop, to eat and to be entertained and educated about the places they visit. Without that, we can have all the natural attractions in the world but still find our tourism industry struggling.