2020-01-13 GC Agenda - Item 10 - Attachment 2 - The Value of Tourism to the Noosa Community October 2019 FINAL REPORT

Extent of Agreement with Negative statements regarding Tourism

Noting that tourism can have unintended negative impacts too, a series of negative
statements were also posed to survey respondents. Most respondents (over 84 percent)
agreed that tourism can disrupt the lives of locals, particularly in relation to traffic,
congestion and parking and restricting local’s access to public facilities. The impacts
individuals felt and their perceptions of the impact of the community as a whole associated
with tourism were somewhat negative (an average score of around -1 to -1.3, where -3 is
‘very negative’ and 0 is no impact).

In addition, respondents noted that other disruptions from tourism can include increasing
property values and the price of goods and services (around 80 percent), and impacting the
environment through litter, pollution and/or natural damage to area (75 percent).
Respondents noted that, on average, the individual impact of these impacts were not large,
but that there were somewhat negative impacts for the environment from a community
perspective (an average score of -1.04, where -3 is ‘very negative’ and 0 is no impact).

Around 63 percent of respondents felt that the character of the region had changed, but the
impact on individuals and their perception to the community as a whole was negligible.

Less than half the respondents felt that tourism was associated with people behaving
inappropriately, and less than a third of respondents felt that too much public money was
spent on developing facilities for tourists that should otherwise go to local public facilities
and services.

With regard to other demographic and locational characteristics, people who lived in
Tewantin and the Hinterland felt that there were more negative impacts on property values
and the cost of goods and services when compared with their coastal counterparts.
However, the impact indicated on the community by respondents was well less than -1 (-
0.41 and -0.61 for Tewantin and Hinterland respectively, where -3 is ‘very negative’ and 0 is
no impact).

In terms of statistically significant age group differences, people between 30-64 were more
likely to assess higher negative personal impact associated with restrictions to public
facilities due to tourism (-1.3 compared to -1.06 for people under 30 and -0.82 for people
over 65, where -3 is ‘very negative’ and 0 is no impact), and people between 30-64 rated a
higher, but still marginal impact on them due to the region changing because of tourism (-
0.24). People aged below 30 indicated a slightly positive impact on them and the
community at large given the region changing (a score of 0.56 for individual impact and 0.39
for community impact, where 3 is very positive and 0 is no impact). People over 65 also
indicated that the regional changes due to tourism were marginally positive on average for
the region (0.23, where 3 is ‘very positive’ and 0 is no impact).

The proportion of people in Noosa that agreed that there were negative impacts associated
with tourism was much higher than those in the Sunshine Coast as a whole. But still, the
overall impact of the issues were considered quite low to minimal.




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