Monday, November 13, 2006

Building Local Tourism -a comment

We have now put up two linked stories on this site, both dealing with tourism development. The first story, Building Local Tourism, discusses what is involved in developing tourism. The second, Frustrations of a Tourism Official, sets out the response of a tourism official to the first story. Both stories were first published in 2004 but remain relevant today.

Australia faces particular problems - these are not unique just to this country - in the drift of people to the bigger cities and (in the Australian case) to the coast line. Regional communities are attempting to meet this challenge with varying degrees of success.

A number of Ndarala's Australian professionals are involved with regional and community development. Others work in different fields but live in Regional Australia. So issues relating to regional and community development are of considerable interest within the Group.

All communities are affected by change. Sometimes those changes are so large that they simply overwhelm local ability to cope. More often, local responses are possible. One of our frustrations lies in getting this message across. As an example here, see the short linked story on the Regional Living Australia blog about the failure of regional communities to make best use of the web.

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