More than 3,150 Tropical North Queensland tourism jobs will be lost by Christmas shrinking the tourism workforce to half its pre-pandemic size, according to new research from the Tourism and Transport Forum (TTF), say media reports.
Mark Olsen, Chief Executive Officer-Tourism Tropical North Queensland (TTNQ) claims that tourism had employed 15,750 full and part-time staff and, with indirect tourism spend, supported a total of 25,500 jobs before the pandemic in the Cairns region.
“By July 2021, we had lost 3,600 permanent staff, even with the support of JobKeeper and a returning domestic market,” Olsen said. “The region grew its workforce across the entire supply chain ready for a busy winter, but now these new recruits, including more than 200 from the tourism industry, who have been in training for months are being told to find other work. Government needs to understand how significant this impact will be on our community where one in five jobs have depended on tourism,” Olsen added.
TTNQ Chair Ken Chapman said income support was needed for the tourism staff who were losing their livelihoods right now. “Employees who are stood down and lost hours of work due to lockdowns in their area are able to get up to $750 per week of Covid disaster income support payments from Centrelink,” he said. But tourism employees stood down because lockdowns elsewhere in the country are causing their employer’s business to be locked out from its customer base cannot receive income support. This is a human tragedy due entirely to Government policy.”
Olsen also said that Tropical North Queensland is, and will remain, one of the most impacted regions in Australia and the outlook for the tourism industry was grim.Without customers, businesses do not have the turnover to keep their highly skilled staff, some of whom have received years of training in specialised areas to become the skippers, dive masters and jump masters that provide the region’s signature tourism experiences.
“Our region has had just 27 days straight without the impacts of a lockdown in key domestic markets in the past 18 months.That period in May was the busiest the Cairns and Great Barrier Reef region had been since before the pandemic as we are the most Googled regional destination for Australian holidaymakers,” he said.
Blogs
