There was a spike due to mining and offshore gas in the past decade or two, but the mining sector has pretty much stagnated now. Also, it was somewhat of a 'fa

There was a spike due to mining and offshore gas in the past decade or two, but the mining sector has pretty much stagnated now. Also, it was somewhat of a 'false spike' due to mining companies using FIFO (fly in fly out) workers from Asia etc. Those workers would come here, work hard, collect their pay packets and the leave to go back to their home countries and spend there rather than locally. Our tourism market, which WAS a huge part of our GDP and employment, has suffered. In my town, the FIFO workers book out entire streets of hotels for their work schedules, meaning tourists have no chance getting a room year round. Local shops and markets are shuttering at a fast clip because no tourists are around the spend money with them. Recent events with the cyclones in Queensland, and the general bleaching of our Great Barrier reef also will have a huge impact on our tourism market, with a reported 100,000 jobs likely to disappear over the coming years across the Eastern seaboard.