SYDNEY, Sept. 27 (Xinhua) -- Australia's Queensland state tourism minister Kate Jones has slammed the Federal Government for not axing the controversial backpacker tax altogether.
On Tuesday, the Australian Federal Government announced that backpackers will not be imposed a 32.5 percent tax as envisioned earlier but instead they would have to pay a 19 percent tax from their first dollar earned.
The new backpacker tax is set to take place on Jan 1, next year.
Jones in a statement on Tuesday said lowering the tax bracket was not a wise idea and wanted the Federal Government to scrap the backpacker tax altogether.
"We want to backpackers to visit Queensland and spend their money in our regional economies," Jones said.
"Regional areas like Rockhampton, Mackay, North Queensland, Far North Queensland rely on tourism jobs."
"Taxing backpackers thousands of dollars is just giving them thousands of reasons not to come to Australia," he said.
Jones said since the tax was announced the working visa holiday visitor nights have been seen down by close to 9 percent in Queensland.
"We do not want backpackers to choose other destinations like New Zealand and Canada," Jones said.
"We know backpackers are worth more than 900 million Australian dollars (692 million U.S. dollars) to the Queensland economy and Turnbull (Australia's Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull) is putting that at risk," she said.
"It doesn't make sense to slug backpackers with a new tax when their contribution to regional economies is so important," she said.
In the year to June 2016, Queensland recorded 12.3 million backpacker visitor nights down from 13.5 million in the 12 months to June 2015.
The total number of backpackers visiting Queensland dropped from 338,000 to 331,000 over the same period.
