Page 2914 - Week 09 - Thursday, 18 August 2005
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raise some serious social issues and some serious economic issues for us in the future. I think there is some sort of idea in some quarters, sometimes expressed by people like the Australia Institute, that somehow the building and construction industry or developers are greedy and bad for Canberra. I think that is unfortunate. It does not recognise the importance of that sector to the economy of Canberra.
Workers here spend money. They shop, they buy supplies and they train our young tradespeople. They pay rent. The MBA have stated that, for every $1 million spend on construction, about 15 jobs are provided. That is important and, with billions of dollars of development in the pipeline, that obviously means many thousands of jobs in Canberra in the building and construction industry. This sector is obviously an important part of our growth. It is not the only part of our growth, but it is not a sector that should be dismissed and demonised as some would have it.
The Australia Institute report highlighted one interesting fact that I think should be noted. It is that young people, those aged between 18 and 34, those who will make up the future of the city in the years to come, were more likely to support an expansion to the size of the city in the future. This just brings me back to my earlier point about the importance of growth. It is in the interests of not only our aging population but also our young people that our population grow, that we retain young people and that we attract young people to Canberra, those who have left and those who come from other places. If our young population continues to dwindle, we will be in a situation where the kinds of services that the elderly need will not be affordable. We will also be in a situation where young people, young families and the working population will have more and more of a taxation burden in order to deal with these issues. Obviously demands on hospitals, roads, public transport and public infrastructure are going to become more of a concern, but I think that growth, retaining young people and attracting young people back to the region, is going to be part of this.
Current growth rates are a cause of concern. In the last year or two in the ACT the growth rate was about 0.2 per cent, whereas in the region the growth rate was somewhere around 1.7 per cent. That is above the national average, so it shows there is a demand for people to live in the Canberra region. I think it is incumbent upon government to provide the kinds of conditions that would attract people to actually settle in Canberra and to stay in Canberra, rather than necessarily choosing places like Yass, Queanbeyan, Goulburn, Murrumbateman and other surrounding areas.
There has been a lot of talk in recent years about sea change, and the other day for the first time I heard the term “tree change”. It is about not just older populations, but other people leaving larger cities like Sydney and Melbourne for a simpler and more relaxed lifestyle in areas like the Sunshine Coast. The Sunshine Coast has overtaken Hobart as the tenth largest population centre and the Gold Coast is now larger than the ACT. But I think Canberra is actually in a pretty good position to take advantage of this because Canberra actually offers much of what sea changers or tree changers are actually looking for. Canberra has many of the benefits of a big city, many of the facilities, but it does not have a lot of the disadvantages of living in a very big city like Sydney or Melbourne.
Our travel times to work are much less than in those cities. We are still, in the main, more affordable, although that is becoming less the case, and that is something I will deal with in a moment. Educational opportunities in Canberra are good and we have a lot of
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