Page 4172 - Week 10 - Tuesday, 21 September 2010
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International Music Festival, the 2009 National Capital DanceSport Championships, and the 2009 Kanga Cup international youth football tournament. These events provided an important mix of spectator and participant-based activities, appealing to a range of demographics. Through this research, Australian Capital Tourism has sought to get a better idea of the types of events that provide maximum return on ACT government investment.
In developing this project, Australian Capital Tourism committed to sharing the results with the relevant event organiser, providing them with a valuable, ongoing reference and planning tool. Members should be aware that individual event results are commercial-in-confidence and, as such, cannot be released publicly. The results of this research have been extremely pleasing. The EAP-funded events that were studied were generally shown to provide strong economic returns for the ACT. This was the case regardless of whether the events were primarily spectator or participant-based, including those mainly catering for junior participants. High levels of interstate visitation were evident and, in most cases, the proportion of interstate attendees outweighed those from the local region.
It was also clear that hosting these events delivered significant flow-on benefits to the accommodation sector and the broader tourism and business communities. These results add weight to the EAP assessment process and justify ongoing support of tourism events through a program of this nature, particularly given the return on investment achieved. The five EAP-funded events included in this research were provided with total funding of $152,000 in 2008-09. In return, the ACT economy benefited through an increase in direct expenditure of $6.62 million and an increase in gross territory product of $9.71 million.
The evaluation included the UCI Mountain Bike and Trials World Championships staged in September 2009. Whilst this event was not supported under the EAP framework, it was considered of high importance to evaluate the tourism impacts from this major event. The results of the MTB worlds evaluation were released publicly in March this year. The MTB worlds was the largest mountain biking event ever held in Canberra, generating additional direct expenditure of $5.48 million and $7.99 million in gross territory product. The event was an outstanding success, a credit to Neale Guthrie and his team at TVE.
Mr Smyth: Hear, hear! Well done, Colonel Guthrie.
MR BARR: Thank you, Mr Smyth. I would like to take this opportunity to congratulate Neale and his team as the event has just been nominated as a finalist in Australia’s best sporting event category at this year’s Australian Event Awards.
The final component of this research project was an analysis of the proposed autumn event concept for 2011 onwards. The modelling work for the proposed autumn event concept provided valuable information that helped inform planning for the event.
Tourism is an important industry for the territory. It injects about $1.3 billion into our economy each year and employs about 13,000 Canberrans. That is why the government continues to invest heavily in the industry. That is why we look to partner
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