TOURISM INDUSTRY CAN LEAD THE WAY

POSITIVE IMPACT: HOW TASMANIA’S TOURISM INDUSTRY CAN LEAD THE WAY

Hamlet Cafe. Photo Credit – Rosie Hastie

In the mid-90s, tourism industry leaders from across Tasmania sat down with the State Government and negotiated for the first time a shared vision for growing the State’s tourism industry.

This first Tourism 21 committed industry and government to work together in seeking to generate $1 billion of annual visitor spending across Tasmania by the year 2000. The T21 approach in bringing tourism industry representatives and government leaders together to determine a set of shared goals, priorities, and actions, has steered Tasmania’s evolution as a visitor destination since that first agreement. Initiatives to professionalise the industry and encourage investment in new products, sectors and markets, as well as strategies to tackle the perennial challenges of Tasmanian tourism around access, regional dispersal, and seasonality, have all been common themes through past T21s. Most recently, the T21 framework has guided Tasmania’s response to the immense disruption of Covid on our visitor economy. In the winter of 2020, when all our borders were shut, government and industry sat down and agreed on over 90 initiatives to rebuild visitor demand, re-establish air access, and support our operators through the pandemic. All of these priorities were designed to ensure Tasmania was able to restore the value of visitor spending to pre-Covid levels as quickly as possible, while keeping one eye on the future and how Tasmania might develop as a destination when the Covid crisis had passed. As this Covid-era T21 reaches its end date, we have progressed nearly every one of those initiatives, and the State is now well-placed to reach pre-pandemic visitor spending levels of nearly $2.5 billion in 2023. But through the pandemic, we also began to shape a clear vision for the evolution of Tasmanian tourism through the 2020s that looks beyond numbers and the pure

Blue Derby Mountain Bike Trails. Photo Credit – Stu Gibson

economic value of tourism. Before Covid, the industry was already considering how tourism impacts the environment, and the communities in which it operates. Tourism operators were demanding action on climate change and environmental sustainability. Many Tasmanians were beginning to challenge the tourism industry to ensure a growing visitor economy did not mean compromising what’s special and unique about our state. COVID has disrupted how we live and see the world. History has shown these types of disruptions only accelerate trends that were present before the disruption. Tourism industries across the globe have taken stock over the past two years in reassessing how we measure tourism success.

Balancing visitor demand and the economic and cultural benefits that tourism can bring to a community, with the need to respect the priorities and values of residents and the people who call destinations home, is critical.

Some destinations have embraced the concept of regenerative tourism, or the idea that tourism should leave a place better than it was. In Tasmania, we are choosing to embrace this idea through a ‘Positive Impact’ agenda in the next iteration of our T21 Strategy. This strategy will set a vision for Tasmania’s evolution as a tourism destination through the 2020s, built around our strengths as an industry, but also our responsibility to foster tourism that makes a positive contribution to the Tasmanian community, environment, and way of life. At the core of this Positive Impact agenda will be our ambition for Tasmania to be a global leader in the transition

Three Capes Track. Photo Credit – Tasmania Parks and Wildlife Service

to carbon-conscious travel. We have a competitive advantage in this space thanks to our carbon-free renewable energy base, but this positioning needs to be supported at all levels of the visitor economy. Working together as an industry to reduce emissions across all of our businesses, while supporting Tasmanian-based carbon offsetting initiatives, is something all operators can be a part of in making a meaningful positive impact on our local environment, while contributing to the global response to climate change. Tackling Tasmania’s generational disadvantage head-on, through innovative training pathways that support more Tasmanian kids into the career opportunities of a growing visitor economy, will not just make a positive impact in these people’s lives, but is also the most sustainable solution to our sector’s longterm workforce challenges. Any genuine commitment to a positive impact agenda also means resolving some of the challenging debates we have across Tasmania about the scale and impact of tourism in some of our communities. We need to listen and respond to concerns from many Tasmanians about the impact of large cruise ships in our ports, and the impact of short-stay accommodation on rental affordability. Getting the policy levers right to facilitate tourism investment and growth on our terms, that maintain our industry values of quality and sustainability to deliver authentic visitor experiences that can only happen in Tasmania, will be the ultimate measure of our Positive Impact T21.