WA puts its best foot forward to support the hard-hit regions

The McGowan Labor government has unveiled more subsidies for West Australians forced to holiday at home.

WA Premier Mark McGowan. Picture: Jackson Flindell

The McGowan Labor government has unveiled more subsidies for West Australians forced to holiday at home, slashing the cost of flights from Perth to remote WA towns such as Broome.

Airlines once routinely charged more than $700 one way for flights to the pearling and resort town. And connecting flights from Perth to Broome to Kununurra could cost $2000.

Two days before a state budget that will be heavy on household bill relief, Premier Mark Mc­Gowan and Tourism Minister Paul Papalia revealed $21.4m to ­create 50,000 affordable airfares.

Regional towns across WA are already packed with Perth-based holidaymakers, although some tourism operators have reported they are either unable to open or unable to open to full capacity due to lack of staff.

And only 500 people have signed up to the WA government’s “Work And Wander Out Yonder” campaign that gives ­subsidies and incentives such as an accommodation allowance to anyone prepared to leave Perth to pick fruit or do other seasonal work in regional WA.

“It is a difficult challenge to confront but I’d rather have that challenge than the one they are confronting in Melbourne and right across the eastern seaboard — in NSW and Queensland they still have the 4sq m rule,” Mr Papalia said.

“Businesses — many of them are not able to make money, and many tens of thousands of hospitality workers in NSW and Queensland are not at work. We don’t have that problem in WA.

“What we have to do is encourage West Australians to think about getting out and working in beautiful holiday regions.”

However, Mr Papalia acknowledged some WA tourist operators were doing it tough. On Monday, more than 200 tourist operators that rely on big-spending interstate and international travellers received business survival grants of between $15,000 and $100,000 each.

The McGowan government has tipped more than $6bn into economic stimulus since the coronavirus pandemic first hit.

High iron ore prices meant WA still recorded a $1.7bn surplus in 2019-20. Amid expectations that WA was headed for another surplus in 2020-21 — due in part to disruption to the iron ore industry in Brazil, and sustained high commodity prices — the McGowan government has come under pressure to spend even more to stimulate investment.

Asked if it was responsible to preside over a surplus when sections of the economy were struggling, Mr McGowan declined to confirm what the state budget on Thursday would forecast. Instead, the Premier said WA had the strongest economy in Australia and was the only state to not go into recession, in part because it had been able to control the coronavirus outbreak early.

After early scares, including outbreaks among hospital workers in the Kimberley — where half the population is Indigenous and especially vulnerable — the state has not recorded a single case of COVID-19 in the community for 180 days.