Good summary of why WA Tourism justifies it role & why the new stadium is a policy tool.
INCREASED competition has begun to bite into the Perth hotel market, with cheaper room rates and the lowest occupancy levels in 12 years.
To put things in perspective, Tourism to W.A. is very low DESPITE Perth being a very nice city surrounded by some varied attractions.
There was a marketing push into Asia because of it's closeness and that seemed reasonably productive. I don't know the status a.t.m. but anecdotally it does seem to have stalled. For some reason the previous government ignored the cruise line industry and now cruises to Perth are going to drop from 60+ to 40+ per year. Packer added something like 600+ rooms at Burswood and when that was completed, in a case of massive Karma, as the Chinese igovernment mmediately shutdown access to it's high-rollers. Together with the continuing massive oversupply of hotel style accommodation there are plenty of bargains to be had in Perth hotels.
The new stadium coming online will provide a boost to tourism. It is a question of how big, from where and for how long. If we take the premise that people will use the stadium to come to Perth tor an event then it's reasonable for that to be only once a year. So that gives AFL 22+ matches, unknown number of cricket matches and one event each for the other codes. Entertainment events usually tour so there shouldn't be much tourism involved there. AFL is the major tenant by far and it looks like it will gross the most tourism by far. The government needs to work with football not against it. If prices are set to high then that could jeopardize any chance of any return (or even moving to the new stadium)
With hotel rates markedly down and modest ticket prices tourism will produce a boost but it will be nowhere near clawing back the cost of construction. As I posted before, the WA government only receives 1/3 of the GST for a ratio of 30:1. If we are extremely optimistic and say the speed of money is 50%(i.e. every second person immediately spends their windfall) then the ratio falls to 15:1 (by mathmatical progression), but that still means that tourists have to spend in Perth $15 million for the government to collect $1 million. That's a huge amount of money to expect from interstate or international tourists alone.
The necessity now, is to pay for the stadium because the federal government are not contributing one bit.