Second winner threatens to quit Whitsundays Tourism amid criticism of sponsor ‘who is singlehandedly destroying everything that we stand for’

This article is more than 2 years old

This article is more than 2 years old

The winner of a Queensland tourism award has rejected its prize because it was sponsored by the mining giant Adani.

Another winner in the 2017 Whitsundays Tourism awards, held last month at Hamilton Island with Adani as a silver sponsor, threatened to quit the organisation unless it cut ties with the miner.

The Guardian understands the north Queensland tourism body, after a board meeting last week, has effectively ruled out future involvement with the proponent of Australia’s largest coalmine.



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Lindsay Simpson, whose Providence Sailing business won a tour and transport operators’ prize, said it was an “appalling” decision to enlist Adani, whose backing of reef tourism awards was “just laughable”.

“We’d been overseas in Europe and we actually had our skipper go and collect the award as our representative, in good faith,” she told the Guardian.

“We heard then that Adani was sponsoring it, so we did some serious thinking. We came to the decision that we don’t want their award, if that’s who they’ve got sponsoring it.

“We thought, if we don’t say something, it’s going to be accepted that someone who’s singlehandedly destroying everything that we stand for is going to be backing tourism awards, which is just laughable.”

Many Whitsundays reef tour operators were outraged by Adani’s now-abandoned plans to dump dredged seabed in reef waters while expanding its Abbot Point coal terminal, just 100km north of Airlie Beach. In 2014 the plans were changed so that the spoil would be dumped in wetlands in the Caley Valley.

Margaret Lawson, a public relations expert who acts for resource companies, said the awards debacle was “not a good look” for Adani, and could set a precedent for other community organisations to spurn financial backing from the controversial company.

Adani paid a modest $2,000 to be a second tier sponsor at the awards night on 30 September.

Simpson said she had great respect for the tourism peak body but Adani was “buying their reputation”.



In a letter formally rejecting the award last week, Simpson told the body that “we cannot, in all fairness, accept an award sponsored by a Adani, a company whose modus operandi is completely counter-productive to all that we stand for as tourism operators on the Great Barrier Reef”.

Another gold medal award-winning operator told Tourism Whitsundays it would quit if Adani was again named as a sponsor. A third award-winning operator, who asked not to be named, said there were “a lot of other people” shocked about Adani’s role when it was read out at as a sponsor towards the end of the event.

“There was definitely a bit of a gasp when Adani’s name was said,” she said. “I personally was taken aback and there were definitely a lot of people around us who felt the same thing.”

Lawson, a prominent Brisbane public relations firm owner, said Adani would have a “stakeholder engagement plan” from “top tier sponsorships right down to local sporting teams” but evidently suffered from a “reputation problem”.

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“The rationale of sponsoring something like a tourism awards event is to demonstrate your corporate social responsibility credentials,” Lawson said. “When people don’t even want to take your money for worthy causes, that indicates a PR problem.

“And given the protest action that took place that a couple of weekends ago around the country, it will be interesting to see if that non-acceptance of Adani dollars cascades right down to those small local community organisations.

“If you see a big event like the tourism awards set a precedent by saying they won’t accept Adani dollars, that could be creating a landslide of organisations that say they won’t accept money from Adani.

“That could provide them with a lot of problems in trying to execute their community engagement strategy.”

Simpson conceded she might be precisely the wrong person to be given an award at an event with Adani backing.

She travelled to India in March with the chairman of Australian Conservation Foundation, Geoff Cousins, in a delegation that delivered a letter of protest to Adani and confronted the Queensland premier, Annastacia Palaszczuk, over her public support for the Carmichael mine.

The chief executive of Tourism Whitsundays, Craig Turner, did not return calls. An Adani spokesman did not respond to a request for comment.