Page 6029 - Week 18 - Thursday, 12 December 1991
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expertise and skills. We should also be encouraging a range of industries, large and small, to settle here or, at the very least, to have a significant presence here because such industries give a sense of economic reality and growth to our city.
But I want to contrast all the appropriate and natural developments of our national capital with what I am calling the quick fix. There are several points. Firstly, as indicated in my speech on Tuesday, we have the macro-economic problem of Australia becoming less and less productive - that is in the best sense of "productive" - while developing a huge $27.5 billion annual gambling industry, essentially a money shuffling industry. It is not in itself a productive industry. I do not doubt for a minute that jobs are created by it, but in itself it does not produce. Again, please see that special front-cover story in the Bulletin of 6 August.
As I look over my 31 years in Australia, I cannot help but remember the nation which in 1960 was booming, developing, growing, expanding, when the kinds of problems that we now have did not exist. By contrast, it was a nation in which women had not even begun to develop their place in society to the degree that they now have. I am not saying that good things have not happened over the last 31 years, but we are on a slippery slope, may I say. I am not exaggerating that as much as some of my colleagues have done, but I believe that we are in danger of seeing our nation as a place with secondary and tertiary industries which depend upon overseas expertise and overseas visitors.
Secondly, we are in danger of buying into the problems associated with high-loss gambling industries. Money is wagered and lost. Most of the profits are then expatriated. In the case of this Austrian casino chain, we are even required to pass special legislation to allow Austrian nationals into the country. I would welcome the Mozarts of Vienna; may they come here; may we have all kinds of wonderful people. I think Gus Petersilka is from Vienna. Of course we love Austrians, and I hope that Austrians love us. I am not getting at that group in particular. I just want to say, though, that we are involved with an economic enterprise whose money will leave not only the ACT but also Australia. Naturally, they will want to supervise the money that they extract from Australia to Austria.
The next point is that there will be an artificial one-off boom for about one year for our local construction industry, and that is not a bad thing. You can create that same kind of artificial boom in all sorts of ways. We could achieve the same, with better long-term results, from a new medical school, for example. But there is the question of where the money comes from. Then, having constructed that, there has to be another quick fix. What I am seeking deep down is that we get out of our quick fix approach to our economic problems.
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