AN ECONOMY BUILT ON MOVEMENT.

Queensland’s relationship with tourism is not incidental. It runs through the economic and cultural architecture of the state like a structural beam — invisible in the day-to-day operation of things, but load-bearing in ways that would be catastrophic to ignore. According to data published by Tourism and Events Queensland and corroborated by the Queensland Treasury, the state’s visitor economy generated $34.7 billion in overnight visitor expenditure in the year ending June 2024, with visitors spending, on average, $95 million every single day inside the state’s borders. The tourism sector contributes $15.7 billion in gross value added to Queensland’s economy, and it directly and indirectly employs 260,000 Queenslanders — roughly one in every fifteen people who hold a job in the state. These are not marginal figures. They are the dimensions of a foundational industry.

What makes an industry of this scale sustainable, adaptable, and capable of renewal is not simply the volume of visitors or the appeal of the coastline. It is the quality of institutional thinking that surrounds it — the research that interrogates its assumptions, the education that trains its practitioners, and the policy frameworks that give its growth direction. In Queensland, a significant portion of that institutional thinking flows from one address: Griffith Business School, housed within Griffith University and operating across campuses that span the state’s two great coastal cities.

Understanding Griffith Business School’s relationship to Queensland’s tourism economy requires a longer historical view — one that traces the university’s own unconventional origins and the way those origins shaped a genuinely distinctive approach to the subject. Tourism, at Griffith, was never an afterthought grafted onto a conventional business faculty. It grew from the same intellectual soil that produced Australia’s first degrees in environmental science and Asian studies. That origin matters. It produced a school capable of thinking about tourism not merely as commerce, but as a form of human geography, ecological stewardship, and cultural exchange — with economic rigour built in at the foundation.

THE UNIVERSITY THAT CHOSE DIFFERENTLY.

Griffith University was formally established on 30 September 1971, when the Queensland Government passed the Griffith University Act. The institution — named after Sir Samuel Walker Griffith, twice Premier of Queensland and the first Chief Justice of the High Court of Australia, a figure who served as the principal author of the Australian Constitution — did not open its doors to students until 5 March 1975, when 451 students enrolled at the Nathan campus, a tract of land on the edge of Toohey Forest approximately ten kilometres from the Brisbane CBD. The buildings at Nathan were designed by Roger Kirk Johnson to follow the slope of the land rather than impose upon it, using architectural means of passive cooling — a built environment that literally expressed the values of its founders.

Those founders — Chancellor Theodor Bray and inaugural Vice-Chancellor John Willett — worked, according to the university’s own archival record, to establish a progressive institution built on equality, inclusion, and fair access to tertiary education. What distinguished Griffith from the beginning was its deliberate departure from traditional academic structures. Where other universities organised themselves around established professional disciplines, Griffith launched with schools of Australian Environmental Studies, Humanities, Modern Asian Studies, and Science. It was, in this respect, the only Australian university to have prioritised Australia’s relationship with the Asia-Pacific and the ecological complexity of its own continent as founding intellectual concerns.

This is not merely institutional biography. It is the explanation for why, half a century later, Griffith Business School carries a distinctive character that separates its tourism and hospitality programs from those of larger and older institutions. The intellectual culture that produced the Griffith Asia Institute — a body examined in a separate article in this series — also shaped the Department of Tourism, Sport and Hotel Management. The curiosity about the Indo-Pacific, about sustainable land use, about the social dimensions of economic activity: these were built into the university from the beginning, and they pervade the Business School’s approach to tourism research in ways that a more conventionally constituted faculty might not have achieved.

A SCHOOL AT THE CENTRE OF A SECTOR.

Griffith Business School today holds dual international accreditation from EQUIS and AACSB International — the two most significant quality assurance frameworks in global business education. It is a founding signatory to the United Nations Principles for Responsible Management Education and the UN Global Compact. In the 2025 ShanghaiRanking Global Ranking of Academic Subjects, the school placed first in Australia for Hospitality and Tourism. In the 2026 QS World University Subject Rankings, its Hospitality and Leisure Management subjects ranked first in Queensland. Its MBA program ranked first globally in the Corporate Knights Better World MBA ranking for 2025 — the sixth consecutive year at that position, evaluated on sustainability, social impact, and knowledge development.

These rankings are not the point. Rankings measure, they do not explain. What they indicate, taken in aggregate, is that Griffith Business School has built something genuinely rare: a faculty where the commitment to responsible, sustainable, and socially conscious business practice is not a branding exercise grafted onto conventional economics education, but an intellectual stance that runs through the curriculum, the research agenda, and the engagement with industry and government.

Within the School, the Department of Tourism, Sport and Hotel Management serves as the primary institutional home for tourism-focused teaching and research. The department’s program portfolio spans tourism management, hotel management, event management, sport management, and marketing — disciplines that correspond directly to the operational structure of Queensland’s visitor economy, which the Queensland Treasury’s own data describes as the second largest tourism market in Australia, accounting for 23.8 per cent of national tourism output. The alignment is not coincidental. Griffith’s tourism programs have been developed in close engagement with the industries they serve, and the School’s industry partnerships across the Asia-Pacific region are an explicit part of how graduates are prepared for the workforce.

"Tourism is one of the world's largest service industries and a key driver of economic development in many destinations around the world."

That statement, drawn directly from the Griffith Business School’s own description of its tourism major, encapsulates the institutional posture. The framing is global, but the laboratory is local — a state whose tourism assets include the Great Barrier Reef, the Daintree Rainforest, the Gold Coast’s coastal economy, the cultural infrastructure of Brisbane, and the remote communities of far north Queensland, each presenting distinct challenges of sustainability, management, and economic equity.

The onchain namespace project at griffith.queensland registers this civic and institutional identity on a permanent digital layer — a recognition that Griffith University’s role in Queensland’s knowledge economy, and particularly in shaping the institutions of the state’s tourism sector, is part of what Queensland is, not merely something that happens to occur within its borders.

THE GRIFFITH INSTITUTE FOR TOURISM.

The formal research dimension of the Business School’s work in this domain is carried by the Griffith Institute for Tourism — known by its acronym, GIFT. According to the Institute’s own published profile and confirmed by the Queensland Government’s science capability directory, GIFT is Australia’s largest tourism research institute, with over 130 academic, adjunct, and PhD members drawn from tourism and tourism-related disciplines including technology, economics, architecture, planning, and environmental sciences. Griffith University is ranked first in Australia for tourism research, and among the top ten institutions globally in the field.

GIFT’s research is structured around four interconnected clusters addressing what the Institute describes as critical challenges and opportunities in the sector. These clusters encompass sustainability and climate change, destination management and experience, workforce and wellbeing, and events and sport management. The breadth of that framework is deliberate: the Institute’s position is that tourism cannot be adequately studied — or responsibly managed — through a single disciplinary lens. An economic modelling team uses econometrics, forecasting, and computable general equilibrium techniques to analyse complex tourism realities. Climate scientists assess vulnerability in Asia-Pacific tourism communities. Planners and architects collaborate on destination master plans. Legal and gender equity scholars examine the conditions under which the tourism workforce operates.

This is a research culture that reflects the founding intellectual disposition of Griffith University itself. Where a narrower institution might produce capable hotel managers and marketing graduates, GIFT produces scholarship that can inform national and international policy. The Institute has collaborated with organisations at both state and federal level and with not-for-profit bodies across the sector. It has conducted work for the Queensland Department of Tourism Innovation and Sport, commissioned studies on World Heritage Area visitor monitoring, and advised on sustainable destination planning in communities across far north Queensland. A co-funded PhD scholarship program with EarthCheck — a global certification and advisory group for the sustainable tourism and travel industry — represents one model of how the Institute integrates academic inquiry with industry-level accountability.

GIFT’s researchers also participate in international science review panels including the Executive Board of the Tourism Panel on Climate Change and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Their work contributes to policy recommendations and to what the Institute describes as advancing science-based climate action across the global tourism system. For a research institute embedded in a business school, this level of engagement with climate science reflects the kind of institutional ambition that only makes sense when a faculty has genuinely internalized sustainability as a core value rather than a peripheral concern.

QUEENSLAND'S VISITOR ECONOMY AND ITS STRUCTURAL DEMANDS.

The scale of the sector that Griffith Business School serves makes the quality of its research and education consequential in ways that go beyond institutional reputation. Tourism, according to data from Business Queensland, directly and indirectly employs 260,000 Queenslanders. That figure covers a workforce of extraordinary diversity — from front-of-house hotel and restaurant staff to destination marketing professionals, from event managers and cruise industry operators to ecotourism guides and national park administration. The sector spans urban, regional, and remote Queensland, and it encompasses domestic and international visitor markets whose recovery trajectories following the COVID-19 pandemic disruption have followed markedly different paths.

International visitor spending in Queensland reached $6.1 billion in the year ending March 2024, according to Queensland Government ministerial statements citing Tourism Research Australia data — representing a full recovery to pre-pandemic levels on that expenditure measure. The domestic market has remained more complex: strong in absolute terms, with 24.9 million domestic overnight visitors recorded in the same period, but subject to headwinds from cost-of-living pressures and competition from international outbound travel. Business travel has emerged as a particularly significant segment, with 5.7 million domestic business visitors contributing a record $5.4 billion in overnight visitor expenditure — 36 per cent above 2019 levels.

Queensland’s tourism regions present further structural complexity. The Fraser Coast, Tropical North Queensland, the Gold Coast, the Sunshine Coast, the Whitsundays, and Greater Brisbane each have distinct visitor profiles, different vulnerability profiles relative to extreme weather events, and different relationships to international versus domestic markets. Managing this complexity — building resilient businesses and destination strategies that can withstand climate disruption, competitive pressure, and visitor preference shifts — requires exactly the kind of multidisciplinary, evidence-based capability that GIFT has been developing for more than a decade.

The Department of Tourism, Sport and Hotel Management’s research agenda reflects these structural demands directly. The Department’s research focus, as described in its own published profile, encompasses understanding event, hotel, sport, and tourism management and the role these industries play in communities, with an explicit commitment to contributing to sustainability, engendering corporate social responsibility, influencing social and government policies, and promoting best practice. These are not abstract commitments. They correspond to the practical challenges facing Queensland’s visitor economy: how to grow visitor numbers without exceeding ecological carrying capacity; how to distribute the economic benefits of tourism more equitably across regional and remote communities; how to build a workforce that is resilient, well-trained, and fairly treated; how to ensure that First Nations tourism, in particular, develops in ways that are genuinely governed by the communities who hold the cultural knowledge on which that tourism depends.

BRISBANE 2032 AND THE NEXT PHASE.

The Brisbane 2032 Olympic and Paralympic Games represent a structural inflection point for Queensland’s visitor economy. The Games are not simply a sporting event with a tourism dividend; they are a catalyst for the long-term repositioning of Queensland — and particularly Brisbane and the Gold Coast — as a global destination. The research implications are significant, and Griffith Business School has positioned itself explicitly in relation to them.

GIFT’s events and sport management research cluster has, according to the Institute’s own research pages, several projects underway that leverage the opportunity to strategically inform the planning, delivery, and legacies of the 2032 Games. Work commissioned by Major Events Gold Coast has developed a new major events strategic direction for that city. Researchers are working on optimising the operations of major events and enhancing the visitor experience. Separate research has identified that First Nations tourism in Queensland is in a position to leverage the opportunities that will emerge as planning for the Games gains momentum — a point that connects the economic potential of the event cycle to questions of cultural sovereignty and Indigenous economic self-determination.

The Games also intersect with the Business School’s forthcoming physical transformation. In September 2024, Griffith University announced the purchase of Brisbane’s historic Treasury Building — a heritage-listed structure on Queen Street, formerly occupied by The Star Entertainment Group — with conversion into the university’s sixth teaching campus planned for opening in 2027. The new campus is projected to accommodate around 6,000 students and 200 staff by 2028, rising to approximately 7,000 students and more staff by 2035. It will house the Schools of Business, IT, and Law, and serve as the home of postgraduate and executive education. The Griffith Business School building on the Gold Coast campus had itself opened in 2014, and the university’s architecture of growth has been steady and deliberate.

The Treasury Building is not merely a real estate acquisition. It is a civic statement. The building has been a symbol of Brisbane’s institutional heritage for over a century. Its conversion into a university campus — and specifically into the home of Griffith Business School — places the institution at the literal and symbolic centre of Queensland’s commercial and civic life, in a city that will, within the decade, host the world. The project connects the Business School’s research and teaching mission directly to the economic and cultural transformation that Brisbane 2032 is intended to catalyse.

THE SUSTAINABLE BUSINESS IMPERATIVE.

There is a tension running through Queensland’s tourism economy that Griffith Business School is unusually well placed to address. Tourism, at scale, is an extractive industry in ways that are rarely acknowledged in economic accounts. It draws on natural assets — the Reef, the rainforest, the beaches, the landscapes — that are not infinitely renewable. It concentrates economic activity in ways that can hollow out regional communities while appearing to benefit them. It generates carbon emissions through aviation and ground transport that are structurally at odds with the climate commitments on which Queensland’s long-term environmental health depends. And it creates workforces that are frequently casualised, underpaid, and poorly supported — a structural problem that became acutely visible during the pandemic-driven collapse of hospitality and accommodation employment.

Griffith Business School’s positioning on sustainability — its founding signatory status with the UN Principles for Responsible Management Education, its MBA ranking at the top of Corporate Knights’ Better World MBA list for six consecutive years, its GIFT research program’s explicit alignment with the UN Sustainable Development Goals — represents a genuine institutional response to these tensions. The research the School produces does not assume that growth is good and that the task is merely to manage its side effects. It takes seriously the proposition that the tourism economy of Queensland in 2050 may look very different from the tourism economy of 2024, and that the university’s job is to help shape those transitions rather than simply to describe them.

GIFT’s climate change and sustainability cluster actively participates in international science review panels. Its work on vulnerable Asia-Pacific tourism communities draws on two decades of interdisciplinary research. Its collaboration with marine scientists on ways to measure and monitor the experiential and aesthetic value of the Great Barrier Reef — asking questions as fundamental as how the quality of a Reef experience changes as the Reef’s ecological condition changes — represents the kind of research that has policy implications at the highest levels of conservation management and tourism governance.

CIVIC PERMANENCE AND THE RECORD OF KNOWLEDGE.

Queensland has, over the course of half a century, built an institution that takes seriously the intellectual demands of the tourism economy it serves. The Griffith Business School is not the largest business school in Australia. It is not the oldest. But in the specific domain of tourism research and education — in the quality of thinking it brings to the management of one of Queensland’s most consequential and most complex industries — it occupies a position that the evidence supports describing as the national leader.

That leadership has been built gradually, through the cumulative effect of research programs that began with the university’s founding disposition toward environmental and Asian studies, through the development of GIFT into the continent’s largest tourism research institute, through the accumulation of international rankings and accreditations that reflect genuine institutional quality, and through a consistent willingness to address the difficult questions — about sustainability, about equity, about the relationship between economic growth and ecological limits — that a less intellectually serious institution might avoid.

The civic dimensions of that leadership are not separable from the institutional ones. When the Queensland Government frames tourism as a sector that employs one in fifteen Queenslanders, when Tourism and Events Queensland describes the state’s target for 2032 as defined in its Towards Tourism 2032 plan, when destination managers across the state make decisions about carrying capacity and visitor experience quality, the intellectual frameworks they draw on are partly the product of work done at Griffith Business School and at GIFT. The university is not an observer of Queensland’s tourism economy. It is, in a meaningful sense, part of its operational infrastructure.

As Queensland anchors its identity onto durable digital infrastructure in the lead-up to 2032, the onchain namespace griffith.queensland becomes part of that record of civic knowledge — a permanent address for the institution whose research, education, and engagement with the state’s visitor economy has shaped how Queensland understands one of its most defining industries. An economy built on movement requires, more than most, institutions capable of thinking clearly about where it is going. Griffith Business School has been doing that work for fifty years, and Queensland’s tourism economy is the stronger for it.