Page 27 - Week 01 - Tuesday, 8 February 2022
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inclusive and progressive cities in the world, and that will continue in 2022. The government will also continue investing in the infrastructure that will make Canberra even better—infrastructure that is built for Canberra and built to support the city that Canberrans want.
Madam Speaker, the ACT government’s response to the pandemic has rapidly evolved over the past few months, through different variants, public health responses and vaccine rollouts. Health experts have suggested that the Omicron wave we are currently experiencing may have peaked across much of the country, and this advice is reflected in the ACT modelling and lived experience.
Yesterday there were 299 new cases of COVID in the territory. We anticipate that this number will fluctuate; it will move up and down in the coming days and weeks. But as we have said throughout the pandemic, vaccination remains the best way to protect ourselves, our families and our community. It is our high level of vaccination, the primary course and the booster program, that allows us to transition away from lockdowns and to return to a more normal life. The territory continues to have the highest double-dose vaccination rate in the country, approaching 99 per cent of our eligible population. We are also leading the way in providing boosters, with more than half of all eligible Canberrans now having received this crucial extra dose of protection.
However, we know this is not enough. We must continue this program to boost the protection of as many of our population as is possible. The willingness of Canberrans to roll up their sleeves and get vaccinated has been the single most important factor in protecting our healthcare system and protecting our community, and we will work to continue this nation-leading program throughout 2022.
More recently, the ACT has also been successful in securing and supplying many more free rapid antigen tests across our community. This includes supply for the use of rapid antigen tests in high-risk settings, providing them to the most vulnerable in the community and distributing RATs to Canberra schools and early childhood education centres to give parents, kids and staff the confidence to return to face-to-face learning at the commencement of this school year.
Throughout the pandemic it has been clear that an effective public health response is crucial to economic strength and it is crucial in this circumstance, at the beginning of 2022, to our economic recovery. That is what underpins confidence, the confidence that has seen our economy bounce back from previous waves of the virus. Through all of the setbacks of the last two years the rebound has been incredibly strong.
Entering the pandemic, the ACT economy was resilient, strong and increasingly diverse. In the five financial years before the pandemic, our strategy to grow the local economy had seen the total number of businesses in the ACT grow from just over 25,000 to almost 29,000 by mid-2019, and that saw the creation of close to 20,000 additional jobs.
Additionally, the government’s sound public finance management—once again recently endorsed—sees us remain the only subnational jurisdiction in the Asia
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