Coronavirus crisis: State Government’s $5m campaign urges West Aussies to ‘Do it in WA’ to back local tourism businesses

The McGowan Government has poured nearly $5 million into a new tourism campaign to soften the blow from the COVID-19 outbreak on the industry.

The “Do it in WA” campaign — with a slogan Tourism Minister Paul Papalia admitted was intentionally cheeky — will urge West Australians to travel locally amid increasing international travel bans.

Mr Papalia called on WA tourism businesses to share their best holiday deals.

“This is the biggest intrastate travel campaign WA has ever seen,” he said.

“This is a call to action for West Australians to support local businesses instead of booking interstate or overseas travel.

“We are already the most sought-after tourist destination in the country.

“We were growing international holidaymakers at four times the national average before coronavirus arrived.”

Mr Papalia said the campaign was intended to support WA tourism as it deals with the impacts of the coronavirus outbreak.

“Some of the regions in particular around Cervantes and Geraldton who were reliant on China, they are feeling (the impacts), the full extent of what’s going to happen hasn’t yet spread everywhere,” he said.

“China represented 7 per cent of our visitors and 15 per cent of our spend internationally. That’s just China, we were least exposed of all the States to China as a market.

“But it’s going to be big because other people right around the world are stopping internal travel.”

He said it was too early to tell whether events like the Margaret River Pro would still go ahead.

“I’ve asked Tourism WA to look at all our events and firstly assess the potential likelihood of them not going ahead and opportunities to reschedule,” he said.

“It’s a bit of an unpredictable environment at the moment, some big events have been cancelled voluntarily by the organisers. We haven’t seen too much of that here but Dark Mofo in Tasmania, I don’t think they necessarily had to cancel but they chose too.

“It may come to that but not at this stage.”