Happy supporting tourism?

These are old news stories but they do still have relevance;

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2009-07-01/augusta-margaret-river-rates-to-rise/1338170
and
http://www.amrshire.wa.gov.au/library/Objectives%20and%20Reasons%20Notice%20-%20Website.pdf
(Page 2, 3rd bullet point up from the bottom of the page)
Basically tourism is an expensive luxury.
Residents in this shire, even if they are retirees or farmers, or otherwise engaged in pursuits that could happily exist without tourism, are forced to pay through their rates.
I have a strong suspicion, based on an expensive education, a lengthy career, and a little background knowledge, that the residents are also subsidising the activities of the property developers.
It is true that many people are employed in tourism and so we must ensure the tourism industry is viable and sustainable.
Back in the day.... I was tasked with delivering a system to measure the profitability of every product line within the Cadbury-Schweppes group. Dominic Cadbury understood that increasing sales of a product line that was losing money was just not good business. When we completed the system it was clear that we had a distribution channel that was failing, the small independent grocer, the corner shop, and also we had a few product lines that were causing huge holes in our profits.
The most serious of these was the split jelly packs, these were specifically created for the small independent shops and consisted of a box of mixed flavours of jelly. The intervention required to produce the case of mixed flavours was too expensive and so we had to drop that line, and many others.
Deliveries to small shops ceased, too expensive. Then buying groups and cash and carry warehouses were initiated and the small grocers had to either join a buying group who would deliver to them, or visit a carry and carry warehouse and collect product for themselves.
This sounds much more simple than it was, but we all know that anything at all that is costing us more money than we gain benefit just should not be encouraged. The shire cannot continue to increase rates to support tourism or to present a glitzy facade to the public. Possibly the public spend on tourism does create private profit, but is this really an area the shire should be engaged with? Do we want our shire manipulating the economic environment to favour one segment?
Or should they pare back their activities using ratepayers funds and allow private enterprise to work towards creating a sustainable tourism industry?
Maybe it is time to recognise that those people who retire here, or who are engaged in farming, or other non tourism related employment are not able to continue to subsidise tourism indefinitely, it is not sustainable. Shire involvement in private enterprise cannot be fair because there is such a diversity of businesses that it would be impossible to assist everyone equally.
The problem is not simple, but we do have a number of indicators that suggest areas for consideration. We are the shire with the highest growth of empty properties. Maybe we could begin by looking at the current strategy of developing homes in advance of any need, thus ensuring they are bought as holiday home. We need far fewer empty holiday homes as the owners do little for our local economy during the 64 day each year, on average, that they spend in this shire.
We could also ask why the Perth and Sydney based property development corporations have been favoured over local resident farmers when the Karridale strategy was developed. These corporations will remove any profit from the land that is developed. The community prepared plans would have retained all the profits in this shire, and enabled local residents to commence diversification and investment in micro-businesses that would have created employment.