Page 2003 - Week 06 - Thursday, 8 June 2006
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I think the other advantage we will see is a streamlining of administration costs in relation to sport and recreation development grants. It was of some concern to me, as an incoming minister, to find that 16 per cent of the program expenditure in sport and recreation development grants was being consumed by administration.
That is clearly above a best practice range of between three and five per cent. One of the benefits that I think we will see flowing from this is more sport and recreation grant money going out to organisations, rather than being consumed by administration.
I think this is an important development and an important strengthening, and it certainly has met the demands that have been placed on me as a new minister in early meetings with sport and recreation groups. They wanted a single port of call. Although the department of sport and recreation itself has been a bit of a journeyman department over the years and has tended to follow a particular minister around to be a subset of that minister’s department, I think that, in the end, co-locating it with the Stadiums Authority in territory and municipal services is a sensible move.
Turning to tourism, obviously there has been a fair degree of comment made around the new administrative arrangements for tourism. Again, the issue that came through straightaway for me was the amount of money that was being tied up in administration within that organisation. It is a concern that, in a government as small as ours, we consume so much of our money in administration. I think that, in the end, for tourism we need to be a little bit more innovative in how we look at the money we apply in that sector.
I have heard comments from the opposition that there is some sort of magic multiplier effect, and I have heard claims as wild as, “For every dollar we spend on tourism we will get $11 back.” There seems to be a failure from some observers to acknowledge the law of diminishing marginal returns. If it were true that we were to get $11 back into the economy for every dollar we spent on tourism, then the logical thing would be to put the entire territory budget—all $3 billion—into tourism and then, hey presto, we would have a $33 billion return. I do not think that is the case. I think there is a limit on this multiplier effect.
Mr Smyth: What is the limit? Have you researched what the limit is?
MR BARR: I think it is considerably lower. My view, in the end, is that the industry does not want to be a bunch of rent seekers, that they do not want to be a bunch of people who come round seeking handouts from government to further their businesses. In fact, if the federal government were to butt out of our civil unions legislation, then we would have a fantastic opportunity to market the ACT as a fantastic destination for gay and lesbian couples to come and join a union here in the ACT. It is a huge market. It is a lucrative market. We certainly could undertake some significant marketing.
In fact, I am very pleased to inform the Assembly that we are working on a new package in relation to a new set of marketing for the territory that is around romance. We are being broad in our definition of “romance” and broad in our scope of marketing. I am pleased to say that we are going to look at targeting some markets that we have—
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