Australia’s ailing tourism industry warned it was in crisis, with a nine per cent slump in arrivals in September due to global economic woes and no relief in sight.

There were just 432,200 international visitors to Australia in September according to Australian Bureau of Statistics figures, compared with 790,600 locals jetting off overseas.

It was a nine per cent plunge from the same period last year, with arrivals contracting in the nine months since January.

The numbers of Australians taking a foreign holiday, meanwhile, has seen growth of 10.3 per cent across the calendar year, with 5.70 million departures due to the soaring Aussie dollar.

Tourism Minister Martin Ferguson said global events such as Ramadan, reducing visitors from Indonesia and Malaysia, and the Rugby World Cup luring visitors to neighbouring New Zealand, had made it an especially tough month.

Australia’s key inbound markets were also struggling, Mr Ferguson said, with Japan working to recover from March’s huge earthquake and tsunami and high levels of economic anxiety and unemployment in the US and Europe.

The tourism industry warned it was at breaking point after a steady decline in visitors due to the dollar’s prolonged run above greenback parity, compounded by natural disasters and the recent shock two-day Qantas grounding.

Resort islands were literally closing down across the Great Barrier Reef and jobs were being axed as visitor numbers dried up, said Tourism and Transport Forum chief John Lee.

“If we were the car industry I would have already had 10 ministers ringing me up saying ‘How can we help’. No one’s calling,” Mr Lee said.

He likened tourism’s crisis to that facing the nation’s auto and steelmakers and said non-mining regional Australia was “at the eleventh hour, in major shock,” calling for government help for tourism-dependent towns like Cairns.

“There’s this general attitude or malaise in a political sense where people say ‘Well, tourism’s fun so we can’t help them out’,” he added.