While Tourism Australia was cutting 10% of its workforce due to budget restraints last year, the agency sent the executive whose team was most affected by the redundancies on a trip to the French Riviera at a cost of more than $66,000, Crikey can reveal.
Crikey reported in June that chief marketing officer Susan Coghill and two colleagues tuned in to a Zoom meeting called to discuss the job cuts, using generic backgrounds on the video call, before managing director Phillipa Harrison let slip that “Susan is in Cannes”, to the frustration of team members back home who were about to be laid off. Most of the redundancies were in Coghill’s own marketing team.
At the time, Tourism Australia refused to answer questions about how much the trip cost and whether the trio flew there in business class or not.
Now, using documents obtained under Australia’s freedom of information law, Crikey can reveal they did indeed fly business class, at a total travel cost of $34,143.
Coghill went to Cannes along with Tourism Australia’s executive general manager of strategy and research, Rob Dougan, and an unnamed member of the marketing team to attend the 2023 Lions Awards for creative communication.
Tourism Australia had entered the 2023 Lions Awards contest, but didn’t win any trophies.
The tickets for the event cost the equivalent of $23,000, a receipt obtained by Crikey shows.
The trio stayed in an Airbnb that cost $5,535 for five days, spent $454 on taxis and Ubers, and splurged $540 on meals and a visit to a shop.
Crikey showed the receipts to one of the employees who was made redundant.
“To be honest it doesn’t worry me that much,” the person said. “Was the timing bad? Yes, but I don’t hold any grudges about people going to Cannes. I think what was worse was them trying to hide it.”
Two people with insight into Tourism Australia who were shown the receipts agreed Coghill and her colleagues didn’t appear to have spent much on meals and entertainment.
“There wasn’t much spent on food and drinks which seems odd for Tourism Australia,” one of them said. “But wow, expensive tickets.”
The new documents also give some insight into Tourism Australia’s public relations efforts, and show that the first Crikey story on the Cannes trip was discussed at the highest level inside the agency.
In June, when the first Cannes story was published, Tourism Australia had just fronted Senate estimates to answer questions about another Crikey scoop: the firing of three employees for using $137,441 of taxpayer funds on private holidays.
Included in the documents released this week was an email from Tourism Australia’s executive general manager of corporate affairs Bede Fennell, sent to the agency’s board of directors, titled “Board media update”.
Under the heading “potential Cannes story”, Fennell mentioned Crikey’s coverage, writing: “As we mentioned [on a call the day before], we expect another article to come.”
Information released to the Senate earlier this month shows that costly trips are nothing unusual at Tourism Australia.
Between July 1 last year and April 30, the total travel expenditure for Tourism Australia employees was $2,514,124. Some of those trips were bought on credit cards, including the single biggest credit card transaction of the financial year: $41,954 for four return trips for staff to “accompany travel agents and media” at an industry function in May.
Harrison, the managing director, travelled for $46,392 between February and June this year, the Senate documents show.
In the course of Crikey reporting this story, the Tourism Australia media team answered several questions seeking clarity on the contents of the freedom of information documents. In response to a request for an on-the-record comment, the team sent the same quotes that were issued by a spokesperson in June.
“Tourism Australia is a marketing organisation and features at major marketing events around the world. Our chief marketing officer attends these events from time to time to represent the organisation and the best of Australian tourism,” the spokesperson said.
“As an organisation selling Australia on the international stage, events like this are an important part of keeping Australian tourism front of mind for global audiences.”
