Back to business events down under

Martin Fullard, CMW editorial director, sat down with Robin Mack (pictured), executive general manager for commercial and business events at Tourism Australia, to discuss the Australian MICE industry’s emergence from the pandemic. What’s the key date Australia opened for business events again and restrictions were eased? We announced that international borders were opening on the 7 February and that came into effect on the 21 February. Initially visitors had to have a PCR test to get in, and that changed from 18 April. So now there’s no pre-testing, you just need to be double vaccinated. Tell me about how the government has supported the industry throughout the pandemic? Our context is a government marketing agency. We had a number of recovery programmes that we implemented quite quickly when the pandemic hit and the borders were closed. A big part of it for us was to focus on domestic tourism and business events. We launched a campaign called ‘Event here this year’, which was basically encouraging people to have events in their own backyard. We had a lot of success with that by talking to the corporate decision-makers and getting them to have their events around Australia. We launched the latest version of this at AIME, which was all about emphasing the ‘time is now’ to get back to face-to-face. It’s important for culture and productivity to get back face-to-face. From an international perspective, what we did to support the industry was stay active in all our markets. Our sector is all about long lead times for conversion, particularly in the association space. We had our bid fund programme that we’ve been running since 2018. If you look back from March 2020, we’ve had 39 big fund wins. For us that subvention programme is working with partnerships, bureaus and industry. The 39 wins are worth over AU$250m (US$173m) to the visitor economy. How has the business landscape changed; and what different requests are your clients coming to you with these days? Sustainability was growing in importance before, and I think it’s ever more so now for us as a tourism board. We look at sustainability in terms of being a key objective for us as an organisation. Our role in this is to educate and advocate. There’s some really amazing Australian stories in sustainability and we want to showcase these industry brands. It’s also important to look and do the right thing with our internal values. Everything we do in events is making sure that we’re following a sustainability code. One of the things we’ve just launched, with the Events and Exhibition Association of Australia, is a carbon calculator that can be used for any event. We actually use this on our own events. We did a leisure event at the Australia Tourism Exchange a few weeks ago and applied the carbon calculator and offset around that calculation. What lessons do you think that your industry in Australia has learned from the pandemic; do you think you’re going to be more resilient should obstacles come further down the line? What we’ve seen is just amazing resilience across the industry. People innovating their businesses and doing what they needed to do to get through. I think we’re definitely coming from a great position, particularly if you think around our vaccination rate as a destination. We’re at 95% of the population double vaccinated. What’s the team’s message at IMEX Frankfurt? We’re coming back, we’re open, and there is an ease of getting into Australia. We’re saying that if you haven’t been able to visit for a couple of years, there has been unprecedented infrastructure development in that time. That’s across all areas of the business event sector. We’ve had new developments in convention centres, venues, accommodation, and food and wine offering. During the past two years, we’ve had over 100 new or renovated hotels come into the market, which adds 12,000 beds. You might know Australia before, but there’s also certainly a new side to discover when you come back. Have you got any new venues under construction or anything planned to enhance your infrastructure any further? We have the Cairns Convention Centre in the far north of Queensland. It is undergoing a redevelopment, so it’s getting an additional 10,200sqm of event space. It’s also getting a new 500sqm rooftop terrace and this opens in 2023. Beyond that, we have a new venue space in Melbourne called CENTREPIECE, which can cater 2,000 people. It is just near the Rod Laver Arena, very close to the CBD. From a convention centre perspective, I also want to highlight the Melbourne Convention Exhibition Centre. They’ve had a real focus on sustainability for some time now and it’s a really great example of Australian MICE sustainability. In the APAC region, Melbourne has been awarded the number one position for sustainability and number 11 globally. There is a new government that has come into place. Has that changed anything in your operations? For us, as a government agency, we work closely with the government, but it’s all about continuing the momentum we’ve got going already from our activities. We’ve got a lot of activity in the pipeline. This new campaign launch, mentioned earlier, is going to run across all our markets. That’s the future proofing. It’s about short-term conversion, but also future pipeline. The bid fund programme will continue and our focus continues.