Page 4916 - Week 16 - Tuesday, 26 November 1991
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You do not read about leaks from EPAC, to my knowledge, and they have even recruited international experts to assist - people who have worked in a variety of public fiscal and private fiscal advising roles.
In the next term of this parliament very important decisions will have to be made about the superannuation fund of the Territory. I think, from memory - the Chief Minister may correct me - she has about $76m set aside there. Those of us who find time to read the Financial Review see that there is a constant debate now about how governments could encourage superannuation funds, private and public, to invest differently. There is a suggestion in today's Financial Review that a one per cent development levy could possibly be encouraged by the Federal Government, through its overall control under the insurance and superannuation Act, for research and development and seed funding to get venture capital for innovative projects.
When you consider what the SFIT lost in the 1987 share crash, the huge sums lost to the Commonwealth super fund and the nominees and so on, you would think that maybe a one per cent venture base would seed fund some innovative economic proposals in a community. That is the sort of decision the future Chief Minister, after the February elections, will have to make. I believe that a Territory EPAC would help make those decisions, and they should not be made solely on the advice of Treasury. I repeat my comment that that advice is pre-eminent in the ACT system and I believe that it has to be balanced from outside sources.
The other issue that we need to look at, as a government, is how we can get some non-smokestack industry into the Territory. The Chief Minister recently opened a further extension at Fern Hill Park, and that, of course, must be worked on. My colleague Dr Kinloch constantly refers to the intellectual resources of this city, the extremely strong base we are getting, admittedly from government computing contracts and the rest, in the information, technology and computing area. We have clean air and we are reasonably earthquake proof. We may even need to look to incentives of the types used by the South Australian Government, such as electricity rebates and other things, to see whether we can bring clean technology to get our own silicon valley going out at Bruce. There is substantial space for expansion and there is ready public acceptance. That surely will be a challenge for the incoming government.
The final point I want to make is that it is time we started services work on the economic bridge with Queanbeyan and the surrounding shires. I know that the South East Economic Development Council, of which my colleague Mr Jensen can speak, is working hard on those issues; but surely we can find some joint venture capital works projects with the State of New South Wales.
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