Page 3027 - Week 09 - Thursday, 13 October 2022
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It also includes attracting investor interest in priority territory projects, the workforce attraction and retention activities to understand barriers in our labour market, and to work with local business to address skills shortages. There is no doubt that attraction and retention of a talented and skilled workforce is a key driver of a sustainable economy, with investment in programs that create skilled job opportunities in key sectors that will enable emerging talent from our higher education sector to be retained in our city and also programs to support Canberra to attract new skills through migration. There were a number of important outcomes from the Jobs and Skills Summit held here in Canberra last month that we will take advantage of.
We are pursuing values-based economic growth and investment. We have developed Canberra as the knowledge capital of Australia and a hub for innovation and creativity. We will continue to encourage and incentivise stronger relationships between our tertiary education and research sectors, business community and government. That includes supporting the Canberra Cyber Hub, the Space Hub and the ongoing success of the Canberra Innovation Network. Each of these areas and programs, as well as those that Minister Cheyne mentioned, including the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Business Support Program, are designed to achieve those values-based economic growth objectives and further diversification of the territory’s private economy.
We continue to engage with the university sector. I want to highlight particularly our commitment and our partnership with the University of New South Wales Canberra towards their city campus, which will bring significant benefits to the territory economy by creating more jobs, both during the construction of the campus and when the campus is operational, attracting more students, researchers and professionals into our education landscape. This campus will diversify and enhance the scope of higher education offerings available in the ACT.
Higher education in our single biggest export industry. We have had a decade-long war waged by the Liberal Party against universities at a national level. That war is now over, and this is the best opportunity this century for rapid growth and higher education in Australia—the best opportunity in this century. We are part of that, and we are working with our existing higher education institutions, UNSW Canberra, ANU, the University of Canberra and the Australian Catholic University, and through our investments in our own Canberra Institute of Technology, to further grow opportunity for students and for employment, research and development in this sector.
Touching on my tourism portfolio responsibilities, we seek to rebuild our tourism economy. Prior to the pandemic the industry contributed more than 18,500 jobs and delivered $2.5 billion to our territory economy. With every $152,000 spent by visitors in our economy, there is a job created for a Canberran. So what we need is to work with the federal government, which we are doing, on both international tourism recovery and domestic tourism recovery. We are seeing that strength, particularly in the domestic market, and we are also focusing on aviation connectivity to improve our international opportunities.
That brings me to international engagement, another area of responsibility within this portfolio stream. We will continue our trade mission program, and we will continue to support inbound delegations from overseas. Our International Business Engagement
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