Reef is on the money

Price tag will become great lobbying tool

FAR North tourism industry leaders believe the Great Barrier Reef’s $56 billion price tag will become a powerful lobbying tool for years to come.

For the first time, the natural wonder’s worth as an Australian “economic, social and iconic asset” was revealed yesterday in a report by Deloitte Access Economics.

Rosie Douglas, director of business and tourism events at Tourism Tropical North Queensland, said the new analysis was a “brilliant thing” for the industry.

“For the first time, from a tourism perspective, they’ve now put a dollar value on it,” she said.

“That’s just going to provide so much leverage for a range of stakeholders.

“It gives us a platform we can now build on, based on fact and not emotion, which is probably what we’ve been lacking in the past.

“This report is critical in terms of what we can do moving forward … you can’t go and lobby if you don’t know what the base is.”

Commissioned by the Great Barrier Reef Foundation, the report found the natural wonder supported more than 27,000 jobs in the Wet Tropics region from 2015-16, injecting about $2.55 billion into the area’s economy.

More than half of the Australian and international residents surveyed for the report felt it was “morally and ethically right” to pay for the Reef’s protection.

Association of Marine Park Tourism Operators director Col McKenzie said the $56 billion valuation provided more “financial and ecological justification” for enhancing Reef protection efforts.

“It is not just a coral ecosystem, it is a valuable financial asset for Australia, and this helps underpin future investment,” he said.

“If we’re going to save the Great Barrier Reef, we have to increase protection measures – there’s no doubt about that.”

A Reef tourism veteran, Mr McKenzie said the “robust” methodology used in the Deloitte report showed the $56 billion valuation was “not fantasy land”.