What keeps Mallacoota going?

In electronic conversation with another frequent visitor to Mallacoota we discussed the importance of tourism, or at least visitation, to Mallacoota.  What would happen if the place ceased to attract tourists?

I'm not sure I am going to be able to answer that question in detail but a look at some Census data might help.  My starting point is a table of employment by industry for the State Suburb of Mallacoota (possibly Gypsy Point and Genoa could have been added but I decided to keep things simple).   

A few industries (eg Mining, Wholesale Trade) had no employment in Mallacoota.  Excluding them, the results are summarised below:

 I then estimated - OK, truth in advertising, guessed - the proportion of each industry employed by tourism.  For some (Agriculture etc, Education) this was zero.  For others it was a non-zero proportion varying from 10% (Health etc services ) to 90% (Accommodation and Food).  Construction was tricky, but including property maintenance, I decided it was half each for residential and holiday rental properties.  Applying the % to the totals gives the following split:

In total I concluded that 98 of 372 employees were employed by tourism.

My next step was to look at income reported in the Census.  This comes in income ranges and to make life simple - we're not talking precision stuff here - I took the bottom value of each range as an estimate of the average income for each range and multiplied it by the number of employed people in each range. Summing the result gave a total of $k14,128.  Please note that I only give the income estimate to the nearest $1,000 to match the numbers in my spreadsheet: a more reasonable statement would be "about $14 million" or "between $12 million and $15 million."

In addition there are 691 people for whom the industry question was not applicable.  Applying the same income estimation procedure gives an estimate of the income of the people for whom industry was not applicable of  $k11,049.  See note above.

The "industry not applicable" people  would comprise three broad groups:

• People under the age of 15 years (130 people for whom the Income question was also not applicable);
• People aged 15+yrs who are unemployed (33); and 
• People aged 15+yrs who are not in the Labour Force (NILF  - by residual, 528).  In Mallacoota a high proportion of these will be retirees

Unfortunately Tablebuilder doesn't allow a cross-tabulation of age x Labour Force Status so it isn't possible to work out the split between retirees and other NILF people.  However there are 495 folk aged 60+ so most of the NILF are old buggers (like me).

By combining my guesses about proportion services provided to tourists and income by income range it is also possible to stretch the bounds of common sense and estimate the income  derived from tourism.  This comes to $k2,813. See note ... It is interesting that the income of suppliers of services to tourism is about 1/6^th of the total workers income whereas they constitute 1/4^th of the workers.  This reflects the tourism workers being concentrated in the lower income classes - possibly mainly part time jobs.

I thus have the following initial picture of the income of Mallacoota:

Taking this any further is probably stretching the ability of the analysis beyond breaking point.  However applying a little thought suggests a couple more ideas.

• An economic base is built from the exploitation of natural resources;
• This would include the activities of the exploitative industries (Agriculture Fishing and Forestry - 24 employees);
• However in the case of an area like Mallacoota the beauty of the environment and the wildlife are exploited by tourists - and attract the retirees.

Thus we have an economic base comprising a small number of employees in primary industries; a fair number of employees servicing tourists; and a large number of retirees.  I'd suggest that if the attributes of the area (scenery and wildlife) which attract tourists and retirees get degraded then the economic base would very quickly become insufficient to support the service industries.

It has been pointed out that the Census doesn't explicitly recognise "tourism" as an industry.  That's because many providers of services to tourists also provide services to other people.  Possibly the Accommodation Industry is close to providing all its output to tourists (depending on your definition of tourist of course) but other industries often provide mixed services.  For example

• The bus that takes tourists from Mallacoota to Genoa to meet the interstate line possibly contributes more value-added to the local community in the school bus services it offers;
• Shops and the pub will provide lots of services to tourists in school holidays (say 10 weeks per year) but for the rest of the year service the locals (hence my guess that 30% of Retail services can be attributed to tourism).

This got discussed at the Second Conference of the World Tourism Organisation (WToO)  in Ottawa in 1992.  I was in Ottawa at the time and working within Statistics Canada on behalf of ABS.  A specialist within ABS had written a paper which WToO wanted to consider, but the author couldn't attend.  So I presented the paper on his behalf.  I'll get to the content (as I remember it 27 years later) shortly but when I agreed to do this I didn't realise the significance of the event.  There were about 600 delegates,  The speaking order in the first session was:

1. Director of WToO;
2. Canadian Minister for Tourism;
3. Director-General of Tourism Canada;
4. High priced International Consultant to WToO;
5. Me

To add more fun to the event the 4th speaker (hereafter p4), although hired by WToO had come up with an approach the WToO didn't agree with.  My job was to politely say he'd got it wrong and here is a better approach.  As he talked, I looked down at the 600 punters and my throat dried up, my pulse hit 3 digits and (had I measured it) my blood pressure would have been close to 4 digits!  A bit of sub-vocal "Om mani padme Hum", got things back on track.

From memory the problem with p4's approach was that he went too far back down the supply line.  As well as the suppliers of accommodation services he added in the guy who made the bricks that the builder (also included in the estimate) used to erect the motel which provided the accommodation.  I think the approach suggested in the paper I presented was more along the lines I have talked about above.  Its a classic case of needing to do some analytical thinking and synthesise careful estimates, rather than trying to force a general; method to do more than it should.