http://www.smh.com.au/polls/travel/oprah-coming-to-sydney/20100914-159nk.html

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From ABC Unleashed

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One wonders how many marketing and public relations consultants are going to feed on the Oprah campaign.

But why are governments doing tourist promotion at all?

The overwhelming beneficiaries of tourism dollars are private industry: hotels, restaurants, transport, souvenir shops, pubs, cafes, barbecue manufacturers and shrimp farms. Tourism promotion does their marketing for them - the government spends millions of dollars trying find customers.

Certainly, the government gains a small amount of money from the GST levied on things tourists might buy. But the same holds true for all Australian industries selling products to Australian nationals - the government gains a little from every sale. So such logic would suggest the entire advertising industry should be subsidised by government.

If the benefits of promotion are so enormous, the tourism industry should be paying for it themselves. There's no reason they can't band together in another of their many peak bodies to sponsor international marketing campaigns. Let industry discover which half of advertising works and which half doesn't.

Government policies designed to promote tourism almost always end in disappointment, as John Brown recognised.

But we don't only push out ads. We also spend vast sums on events to try to lure in overseas crowds.

The major events strategies of Commonwealth and state governments are predicated on a belief that big sporting contests translate into big touristy payoffs.

This month is the 10th anniversary of the Sydney Olympics. We ran a good event. But we got a bad Olympic hangover. Visitor numbers to New South Wales actually declined relative to other Australian states. It's not our fault: Beijing and Athens had the Olympic hangover too.

The Sydney Olympics was a bigger deal than Oprah's tour ever could be. We earned a great deal of international goodwill and publicity in those few weeks in 2000. But tourism went backwards.

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Gus: the Australian continent is a fantastic place to visit — and stay... But one needs to be prepared to accept a massive flatitude to experience many little gems. The people are usually friendly, the light is bright and the birds are very smart. To discover why some people like it here is a matter of discreet investigation rather than bold tourism. The place invites to immerse oneself in a rhythm of a different mindset where competition is not about outdoing the others but bettering oneself — often easily painlessly done in a glorious setting of nature and/or city life...

Although there are some whingers in Sydney, there is far more joy and giving, about it...

Dry river bed, central Australia — Picture by Gus.

Painted Desert — picture by Gus.

Bondi Beach, Sydney — picture by Gus

BRACE yourself, Australia. You are about to be Oprahed. On December 14, you will join the talk show queen on a couch outside the Sydney Opera House and you will have your dirty little secrets brought to light. Your shameful past will be exposed. You will reveal the bits of yourself that you never thought you would share with a stranger, and you will be liberated. When it is all over, you will emerge better, stronger, healthier, happier. By the time Oprah is finished with you, Australia, you will be ready to "live your best life" (TM). You go, Aussie.

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We all know of "our" convict past, of the decimation of the Aborigines and a few other sins committed in the name of progress. No thing much more tragic than slavery and the land grab from the "Indians" in the US, can come out of the Aussie history. We don't need anyone from Yankeeland to rub our nose in whatever... Meanwhile, here are a few Gus pictures of "wild Australia', the Bungle Bungles...

A bedridden Oprah Winfrey has taken to Twitter to quell reports that she's planning to host a live show in Cairo's Tahrir Square, the epicenter of a revolution that ousted Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak.

"In bed with flu since Oscar show. Hearing reports that I'm taking show to Cairo. NOT TRUE. Have no plans to do so," the talk show queen tweeted.

Egypt's new tourism minister Munir Fakhri Abdelnur was quoted yesterday by the state-owned Al-Ahram newspaper as saying Winfrey had accepted an invitation "without hesitation."

http://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/tv-and-radio/oprah-denies-shell-host-cairo-show-20110305-1bijo.html

Key organisers of the wave of recent US protests over police treatment of African-Americans have criticised Oprah Winfrey over comments she made to People magazine criticising their movement as "leaderless."

"I think it's wonderful to march and to protest and it's wonderful to see all across the country, people doing it," she said in a video interview posted on the magazine's website.

"But what I'm looking for is some kind of leadership to come out of this to say, 'This is what we want. This is what we want. This is what has to change, and these are the steps that we need to take to make these changes, and this is what we're willing to do to get it.'"

Her remarks came during an interview promoting Selma, the film she produced about the 1965 protests in Alabama over voting rights for African-Americans. Her critique, and the reaction to it, underscored the rift that has opened between older black trailblazers and a younger crop of black activists since the police killings of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, and Eric Garner in New York City.

Organisers who have been active in Ferguson and elsewhere used Twitter to call on the TV host to do more.

read more: http://www.smh.com.au/lifestyle/celebrity/protesters-lash-out-at-oprah-over-comments-they-lack-leadership-20150103-12hiqb.html

"Some kind of leadership" would require someone like Martin Luther King... That is to say someone who is prepared to put his/her life and its comfort on the line. Someone with the power of intellectual thoughts and the ability to distil these thoughts into easily understood mottos. It needs a media decidedly open to accept this person for the power they transmit. This MMMM media acceptance ain't going to happen in gloriously prejudiced America or in any other country where the power of any underclass is to be belittled rather than praised for its resolve and demands for justice. And we get distracted by football, etc...