Minister Welcomes Tourism Recovery

Minister for Tourism and Major Events, George Souris, has welcomed new data showing promising signs of a recovery in the previously sluggish NSW tourism sector.

“Newly released research shows NSW is now performing strongly in key economic indicators for jobs growth in the tourism sector as well as visitor expenditure,” Mr Souris said.

He explained that the Tourism Satellite Accounts, prepared by Tourism Research Australia, estimate the worth of the tourism sector by combining the contributions of various goods and services across the economy.

Mr Souris said the new report shows the full extent of tourism’s contribution to the NSW economy, with robust growth in employment, visitor consumption and value-added benefit.

“In 2010-11, visitors consumed $30.5 billion of goods and services in NSW, an increase of 6.8 per cent on 2009-10. This is almost one-third (32 per cent) of the total national tourism consumption of $95.7 billion.

“When it comes to jobs, NSW has risen by six per cent to 159,000 people directly employed in the tourism sector, which is almost five per cent of all people employed in the State.

“In fact, NSW contributed most to the total number of all Australians directly employed in tourism in 2010-11 with 31 per cent, followed by Queensland (124,000 or 24 per cent) and Victoria (118,000 or 23 per cent).

“Also, the number of people indirectly employed in the tourism sector in NSW has surged by 7.7 per cent in the last 12 months to 279,000, the highest annual increase in the last four years.

“These are positive figures that show that the NSW tourism sector is still doing the heavy lifting as far as national sector performance is concerned.

“The NSW performance is also encouraging despite other dragging economic influences that directly impact on tourism, such as a high Australian dollar and low consumer confidence in traditional in-bound tourism markets.

“With so much economic prosperity flowing from this vital sector, these results underscore the importance of our Government’s focus and commitment to growing the visitor economy in NSW and the importance of the soon to be release Visitor Economy Taskforce report advising how the State can double visitor expenditure by 2020,” Mr Souris said.