Why? Because all progressive cities have a tourist icon.

Sydney has the Harbour Bridge, Melbourne has its cafes and restaurants, Gold Coast has its beaches, Dubbo has the Western Plains Zoo and Bathurst has Mount Panorama.

They all have one thing in common: they attract tourists who inject large amounts of money into the local economy, which creates jobs, which then impacts on the continued growth of the city population, which attracts new industrial factories, shops and other business houses.

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Tourists fill our hotels/motels, they eat in our cafes and restaurants, they drink in our pubs and they spend money in our small businesses, all of whom rely heavily on tourists to survive.

To have a go-kart track on top of Mount Panorama will attract the world's top professional go-kart drivers along with all their support teams and fans from around the world and from within Australia.

Council has already spent tens of thousands of dollars on the DA to put a go-kart track on the chosen site.

Council has also spent many hundreds of thousands of dollars on a cultural investigation into the surrounding area that found no evidence of any items that would be likely to jeopardise the building of a track.

To now not go ahead and to move the site would have a tremendous financial shock upon council's expenditure and forward budgets and ultimately impact on ratepayers.

I believe with the professional expertise of council's parks and gardens department that both parkland and the go-kart track could live in harmony and add to the attraction of more tourists and benefit ratepayers.

To ensure a continued progressive economy that provides jobs for our children, sometimes a compromise must be made.