It's election time. While a date may not have been set for the 2012 State election campaigning has definitely begun.

Shadow Minister for Tourism, Manufacturing and Small Business, Jann Stuckey, walked the streets of Port Douglas yesterday flanked by the LNP's candidate for Cook, David Kempton, to meet local retailers.

Ms Stuckey then addressed around 15 guests at an informal meeting at Sea Temple Resort and Spa to spruik the merits of the LNP's Tourism Strategy document, while using the opportunity to take aim at the State's government funded tourism body, Tourism Queensland, saying they lacked accountability.

"I'm appalled at the lack of collection of data...they don't want to be able to produce those figures," Ms Stuckey said. "That's across the Government whichever department you look at you'll find that they just don't measure.

"If you look in the (TQ) annual report you'll see a stark lack of reporting on certain campaigns.

"They'll talk about the ones that were really good like 'The Best Job in the World' and they will value it on about how many hits they got on the website, whereas I would convert that as overnight expenditure, how many nights or seats did we actually get? That's the way I'd measure it, but that's not done.

"This Vitamin Me (a $4m campaign encouraging workers to use their annual leave in Queensland) stuff, The Pledge (encouraging operators to increase service levels), the Pledge was a disgrace.

"It was ridiculous and it was blackmail for people (tourism operators) to go on the road that took them interstate and brought them no dollar value."

Ms Stuckey hinted that a new partnership with TQ, Regional and Local Tourism Organisations would be formed should the LNP take government with a focus on greater accountability for the State body.

"I can't stress enough the need for proper reporting and collection of data and KPI's (Key Performance Indicators). And if you do bad you should fess up, it should be out there in the annual report for people to see, not 'this campaign was measured this way, this one wasn't...

"The budget papers this year, they changed the reporting mechanism so you couldn't compare it to last year.

"You cannot expect us as the LNP to throw millions of marketing dollars at TQ if that's going to continue."

Ms Stuckey said the LNP's Tourism Strategy dubbed 'CANDO' aims to return Queensland as the country's number one tourist destination.

At a glance, the aims of the strategy are to:

• Provide enhanced opportunities and communication with the tourism industry
• Deliver a 20 year strategic plan for Queensland tourism
• Grow overnight visitor expenditure to $30 billion by 2020
• Improve decision making and support for the tourism industry
• Facilitate new infrastructure and investment
• Secure new aviation services
• Improve prospects for tourism employees
• Enhance marketing efforts

Those in attendance raised a number of issues including concerns over penalty rates of pay, the impact of growth in the mining industry on the tourism industry and the loss of skilled labour to the mines due to the lure of large pay packets, and the apparent lack of any political advocates for the tourism industry. 

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