On 5 June 2018, the Premier, the Hon Mark McGowan MLA, replied:

Answer: (2)(a)-(c)

Considerable analysis and evaluation has occurred regarding the prospect of additional or new flights from the Government’s priority markets such as China and Japan for the State. Tourism Western Australia undertakes rigorous, and conservative, economic modelling to assess the benefit of a flight and continues to review how best to undertake and improve this. To date, this is currently restricted to visitor expenditure: capturing the extent of a visitors spend in Western Australia such as accommodation, food and beverage, tourism product and activities, car hire, to name but a few.

Most recent modelling on the China and Japan market has estimated that the uplift in visitor spend from targeted new aviation capacity as $542.32 million over three years’ Noting that this accounts for visitor spend only from these two prime leisure tourism markets for Western Australia.

It is anticipated that wider direct and in-direct benefits such as freight would increase this substantially. The agency is currently reviewing the India market and will seek to undertake economic modelling in the near future.

The details of economic modelling are commercial in confidence and not available to the public given the level of confidential information contained within, which would potentially disadvantage the State if provided to competitors or made available publicly during the course of negotiations with an airline.

The State’s economic modelling reviews the total economic benefit via visitor expenditure to the State of Western Australia. Visitor expenditure by region and by visitor market is undertaken by Tourism Western Australia’s Research team in its quarterly analysis of the International and National Visitor Surveys released by Tourism Research Australia.