At the risk of alienating an average of 90% of our readers in the great state of Western Australia — please don’t secede from reading Crikey, guys! — this is pretty outrageous.
WA’s Tourism Minister Paul Papalia launched a “staycation” campaign late last week encouraging people to holiday in the state which has had no community transmission of COVID-19 for months and has been able to return almost to normal — which is fair enough.
Except, the WA government is choosing to partner with Expedia offshoot Wotif for the $500,000 campaign. At a time when local businesses — particularly in tourism — are on the verge of collapse, surely there’s a better recipient of public money than a US-owned business that employs virtually no one in Australia and, until very recently, paid zero tax here.
I thought that being a foreign company employing few Australian and paying little tax was a precondition for government largesse.
There does not seem to be any sense of proportion as to where the promotion by government might end and the business aspect might begin.
Fifty years ago the communist blocks were ridiculed for managing the entire game. Now, it seems, that strategy has been exported to the West.
Here I am, paying $35 for an Australian made mask and our governments aren’t even buying Australian! We are so stupid aren’t we? Just go with CHEAP or FLASHY. When we should be keeping every dollar here and using an Australian company.
Didn’t an Australian invent the WIFI? And the photocopier? But instead of running with these inventions, and continuing the tech revolution… we outsourced everything O.S. Get some cheap labour in China to make everything.. and China said: “YES PLEASE”.
Took all that free technology they didn’t invent and they RAN with it…Now they are more technologically advanced by a long way.
There is a price to pay for outsourcing. Look at the recycling situation in Victoria? We went with the cheapest… and he filled up Victorian land with the toxic stuff, filled up whole factories with it. The price we pay for this folly has still not been paid.
Are we going to keep just giving everything away until we have nothing left?
It would be nice to be over there right now. So many gorgeous places to visit, and presumably the number of tourists must be right down. Oh Coral Bay, I will see you again, one day.
To make this work it needs to be easy. Sadly there is no Australian company that provides a comprehensive travel booking service for holiday houses, hotels, b&b etc.
At least wotif has some Australian staff in Brisbane. It also has popular Australian filters, missing from the other big sites, such as pet friendly. If you don’t want to trawl through many websites it is the least-worst choice.
Charlie, what would you suggest as an alternative?