Should events and tourism really be under one roof?

Three different organisations, three different purposes

Tourism Victoria, the Victorian Major Events Company and Melbourne Convention Bureau were specialist organisations with different purposes, capabilities, cultures and networks.

Tourism Victoria had a long history of successful destination marketing, including the iconic You'll Love Every Piece of Victoria "Jigsaw" campaign, which helped transform perceptions of Melbourne and Victoria as visitor destinations. It had built up decades of expertise in understanding markets, positioning the state and persuading people to visit.

Melbourne Convention Bureau was Australia's first convention bureau, established in 1966, and had played a key role in making Victoria the clear national leader in business events. Its expertise was quite different: building relationships with associations and industries, identifying opportunities, developing bids and persuading organisations to bring their conferences and conventions to Melbourne.

Victorian Major Events Company had become internationally respected for its approach to major-event strategy and acquisition. Its strength was not simply bidding for events, but identifying events that could deliver value to Victoria, understanding what would create value for the event owner, and developing propositions that achieved both. VMEC was instrumental in building Melbourne's extraordinary portfolio of major events. Its approach was regarded as international best practice, with elements of the Victorian model adopted in other places.

Of course there was overlap. Events bring visitors. Visitors stay in hotels, eat in restaurants and visit attractions. Tourism marketing can help make an event destination attractive.

But overlap doesn't make them the same thing.

The establishment of Visit Victoria increasingly brought them together under the umbrella of the "visitor economy". The official announcement described a new organisation that would bring tourism and major events "under one roof", provide a "single, unified voice", target new streams of visitors and undertake an ambitious marketing campaign.

Even the choice of Visit Victoria's first CEO was indicative of the mindset. The government appointed a highly experienced marketer whose background was primarily in fast-moving consumer goods rather than events or tourism.

Marketing expertise is obviously valuable. But marketing a destination is only one part of building an events economy and a tourism economy.

Major events have to be identified, created, negotiated, won and sometimes delivered. Business events are built on years of relationships with associations, industries, universities and professional communities. All of this takes specialist knowledge, commercial judgement and real operational expertise.

Over time, the distinction became increasingly blurred.

What happened next?

It would be wrong to suggest that restructuring into Visit Victoria caused everything that followed. The decade included Covid-19, which devastated both tourism and events, changing economic conditions and increasingly aggressive competition between Australian states.

But the restructure was intended to make Victoria more competitive. Ten years later, the results deserve examination.

When the Andrews government came to office, a major EY/Business Events Council of Australia study found Victoria accounted for 36.0% of Australia's direct business event expenditure - easily the largest share nationally.

The latest Tourism Research Australia measure is different and therefore not directly comparable, but the relative position is striking. In 2025 Victoria accounted for 21.5% of national business event visitor expenditure, compared with 33.9% for New South Wales and 21.3% for Queensland.

The government's own organisations tell a similar story.

In 2018/19, Melbourne Convention Bureau (which is integrated within Visit Victoria) won events representing 136,000 delegates and $507 million in economic contribution. In 2024/25, those figures were 57,000 delegates and $270 million. Interestingly, the actual number of events won was almost identical - 229 compared with 230.

At the government-owned Melbourne Convention and Exhibition Centre, the number of events fell from 1,297 in 2018/19 to 714 in 2024/25, while reported economic impact fell from $1.1 billion to $686 million. This was despite a $205 million expansion of MCEC opening in 2018 and significantly increasing its capacity*.

Perhaps most concerning is what has happened to our industry's people. Australian Bureau of Statistics data shows Victoria had 11,544 people working as Conference and Event Organisers in 2018/19. In the year to March 2026 there were 6,969 - a fall of 40%. New South Wales now has 12,802, nearly twice as many.

The major events story is also sobering.

Victoria has continued to secure valuable one-off and limited duration events, including an NFL game in Melbourne this week. But it has not added a new recurring annual major event to its portfolio over the decade.

Meanwhile, the Australian Motorcycle Grand Prix and World Superbike Championship have been lost after more than three decades. And there was the extraordinary failure of the 2026 Commonwealth Games, which Victoria withdrew from after being unable to get together a viable delivery model - resulting in a $589 million in cancellation costs.

This is particularly striking because Andrews himself warned in that 2015 speech that Victoria could not "rely forever on the Kennett-Bracks legacy".

Much of Victoria's major event portfolio today is still precisely that legacy from the Kennett and Bracks governments.

* figures are from MCB and MCEC's published annual reports

The problem with the 'visitor economy'

For me, the most important lesson here is about what happens to our thinking when very different industries are handed a single identity. It goes well beyond organisational charts.

Calling everything the 'visitor economy' may make government structures simpler. However, it doesn't make the industries themselves the same.

The event industry and the tourism industry have different purposes, economic models, operational models, businesses, skills and people. This was reinforced by a Victorian parliamentary inquiry into the two sectors in 2021.

Events certainly generate tourism. But this is rarely their main purpose.

Businesses use events to launch products, reach new markets, train their people and build the relationships their business runs on. They are also one of the main ways organisations drive innovation and change: a franchise convention is where a business network adopts new systems and commits to invest, and a major industry conference is where a whole sector works out how to respond to new technology, new regulation or new competition. Associations use events to advance whole professions.

For-purpose organisations rely on events to raise awareness, educate their supporters and raise much of the money that keeps them running. Community events bring people together to build connection, local identity and to help them deal with change.

Major events do something different again. They shape a city's identity and reputation, build its confidence and show the world what it can do.

And the event industry is itself is also an export industry. Victorian companies and professionals design, produce and deliver events elsewhere in Australia and internationally. There may not be a single additional Victorian visitor or hotel room involved, but Victoria is exporting knowledge, creativity and expertise.

All of this gets lost when events are understood mainly through visitors and hotel room nights.