QHA-Review_July_digital

FEATURE
“It’s been a long haul and I have to say it’s huge. We
had a great working party in place – Steven Ferguson,
CEO of the AHA, Ian Horne, CEO of AHA South
Australia and Richard Munro, who was the previous
CEO of AAoA.
“It was great timing that we were able to come
together under the direction of Scott Leech, who was
our national board president, and also Simon McGrath
and Julian Clarke, who were the president and vice
president of the AAoA board.
“They all came together and said this is the best time
to do it. So the working party was formed, which
allowed myself and Dean Long, who was CEO of
the AAoA, to just focus on member requirements. It
was full on – we were pushing into governments with
JobSeeker and JobKeeper and there was a lot to do.
“We made some great inroads though, and we had
some great successes for the industry. We were
probably working overtime for a while, but whether it
was state government or federal government, we really
felt like they were listening – they were very engaged
with us,” he said.
Along with being heavily involved in sorting out the
nuances of bringing together two highly active industry
bodies, Michael and the merging teams at the AA and
TAA are also continuing to do what they do best –
addressing issues to the government that keep hotelier
members up at night.
When asked about the big issues in the
accommodation industry that are going to be tackled
in the coming months at both federal and state
levels, Michael said there is plenty happening in many
different spaces.
“I was in Canberra last week and we had good
meetings with Senator Farrell, our tourism and trade
minister. It was great to be able to talk with him about
where we are at the moment because our international
tourism is certainly building, but it’s not building at the
speed we’d probably like it to be.
“There’s been a lot of banter around saying we had
all our eggs in one basket with China, but they were a
huge contributor in 2019 with 1.4 million visitors.
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