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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2004 Week 10 Hansard (Tuesday, 24 August 2004) . . Page.. 4054 ..

only working on building business but also on building the environment, the revitalisation of Civic and City West—the developments that will take place there—and the precinct that will develop at City West.

The economic white paper is a generational strategy. Accordingly, many of the important changes that we are trying to introduce will be ongoing. It will take time to build critical mass in our biotech sector. Some of our priority industry sectors may not come but new sectors and opportunities will emerge and we will have the policy and program dexterity to assist their development when the time is right.

Exciting new business programs are now in place and existing programs have been extended because they work. The task ahead is to channel the support to the right firms at the right times. The Small Business Commissioner will establish a work program that adds value. The legislation provides the landscape, but the proof of the pudding will be in the eating and I am confident of long-term success.

The revitalisation of Civic and the development of City West are a 10-year project that will be built around many incremental achievements. The commercialisation investment fund will support many great ideas, many of which will go on to achieve commercial success. As I said at the launch of the economic white paper in December of last year, some of the actions will be subject to a phased implementation program.

The economic white paper is a strategy that builds on the enormous success of the past three years, and I listed earlier, at question time, some of the conditions that prevail in the ACT right now. There has never been a better time for a stronger economy or an economy that has been performing this well in the ACT in its history. The business confidence that we have is shared by many of the surveys that have been conducted by the Business Review Weekly and by their assessment of the state of the states, by the financial review of our budget.

I will table the full speech. I conclude at that point and say that I believe that the government has more than honoured its commitment to deliver on the various initiatives that we outlined in the economic white paper and we will continue to build on the work that has been done. I present the following paper:

Government’s Economic White Paper implementation—Ministerial statement, 24 August 2004.

Planning

Discussion of matter of public importance

MR SPEAKER: I have received a letter from Mrs Dunne proposing that a matter of public importance be submitted to the Assembly, namely:

The state of planning in the ACT.

MRS DUNNE (4.04): When the Liberal government left government in 2001, it had set in train a process of assessing Canberra and its sustainable future in cooperation with the OECD. The result of that work was finally published in May 2002—it is entitled Urban renaissance—Canberra: a sustainable future. This is a work of the OECD that looked at

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