Tourism Queensland has created a short list of 200 applicants for the Caretaker of the Great Barrier Reef job. There were nearly 35,000 applicants for the job so to make the short list is quite an accomplishment.
Tomorrow, March 3, the board will post the top 50 applicants on their website. The public will then be able to vote for their favorite from that list. The top-vote getter will become the wildcard applicant who will also compete with the top 10 finalist.
On March 6, the top 10 applicants and a top-vote getter will be announced. The caretaker job will be awarded from these 11 applicants and will start the job on July 1.
Many applicants were cut out of the process because the server could not handle all of the last minute submissions. It is estimated 4,000 submissions were attempted in the last hours before the deadline.
The job pays about $97,000 US ($150,000 AU) for 6 months. This is less than 10% of the AU $1.7 million budgeted for promoting tourism in Queensland. So far, the campaign seems to have paid off with the amount of publicity it has received.
Will this publicity pay off in tourist dollars?