The Australian Governments travel blunder roundup

Over the past few weeks there have been some fairly amusing travel related articles floating around the Australian media that have caught my eye. Taken individually they seem almost comical, but when you look at them as a trend it becomes downright disappointing.

Firstly there is the, “Kevin Rudd should ’sell Australia” piece on news.com.au that suggests Prime Minister Kevin Rudd should follow in the footsteps of Crocodile Dundee and Lara Bingle as a brand ambassador for Australia. The last time I checked, being the head of a country meant you would promote it by default? Judging by the comments section at the bottom of the page, my feelings were shared by most of the readers:

To further illustrate my point, I’ve combined our past brand ambassador with our proposed future ambassador to create Kevin Bingle, the ultimate marketing tool:

All joking aside, I am sure we could find someone with more international appeal with the under 50’s market.

Next up was the heraldsun.com.au with, “Pop stars could be forced to disclose whether they lip-synch under new laws”. Brought on by the public outrage at a Britney Spears concert gone wrong, the Australian government has suggested that it may force promoters to disclose whether or not the show will be live or pre recorded. I guess it wasn’t hard enough to get international acts down under before, they figured it might be good idea to make the prospect of an Australian tour even less profitable by throwing some bureaucracy at it.

Last but certainly not least, we have the mind boggling News.com.au article, “Councils want to charge tourists for visits to the Blue Mountains”.  Local councils are looking to charge day visitors to the Blue Mountains National park for the use of free public services. To quote the report produced by the council:

“The travel levy concept particularly identifies the day visitor as a group who visit the city’s iconic sites free of charge, utilise public amenities and put pressure on the city’s infrastructure without making any form of direct contribution to the city,”

No contribution to the city, you say? Last time I checked tourists still eat food, buy souvenirs and support local businesses, not to mention tourism is one of few industries that actually improved this year. I am shocked that a region benefitting from tourism would take such a narrow minded approach to an industry that essentially put it on the map in the first place. Maybe next time the council could look at taking the money it spent to produce its report and spend it on developing profitable services at tourist sites that could offset its losses.

I hope this isn’t a sign of things to come, Australia generally has a clear picture of the future for its domestic and international tourism, so I will assume this past week was just a bad coincidence. I still whole-heartedly embrace the idea of government getting involved with tourism, but sometimes it needs to take a back seat: Prime Ministers are not pop culture icons, consumer affairs ministers are not the performance police and tourists are not a burden.