Page 2922 - Week 09 - Thursday, 18 August 2005
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Revenue will always be the instant solution of governments. Mr Corbell made an interjection about the appeal of the income tax that exists in the state of Oregon. I think the idea of more tax imposts on a younger Canberra population will be a matter of concern down the track. Whilst I do not think Dr Foskey’s idea of drilling for oil or starting mining in the ACT will carry a lot of credence around the community, it is novel if nothing else. I think that, whilst it is probably not something that will receive a great deal of public support, at least it showed some thought going into the problems we face. We all want Canberra to be the best place for living, for business and for recreation but, of course, the big question is how we can make that happen. A key measure of how attractive Canberra is to people is whether they choose to come here and stay here, and indeed whether they come back if they leave here. On that test we are not doing so well. The net population growth is, in fact, four per cent, compared with 1.2 per cent nationally. That is, the ACT population is growing at one-third of the national rate.
On 28 July this year I took the opportunity to participate in a seminar staged by the Canberra Business Council called “Beyond the Canberra plan”, where I heard some fascinating addresses. It was one of the best prepared summits or conferences I had ever been to. Unlike many, where you hear people just give casual dissertations about their particular areas of interest, to their credit the presenters not only highlighted issues but also put forward suggestions and solutions.
I did not agree with every point raised, but there was an incredible amount of initiative shown in that. The Canberra Business Council deserves commendation for its initiative. There was an address by Mr Mark McConnell, a local Canberra business identity. He spoke about the very serious issue of population growth and, in particular, about the impact of skills shortages. In his words, businesses rate skills shortages as the most important issue they are currently addressing. He highlighted the fact that we are seeing 2,500 young people leave Canberra annually.
I accept that people move. One of my own children will probably be heading overseas shortly to play football in another country. That is part of life and part of growing up. It seems to be even more prevalent these days that people go and spend a bit of time in other countries. It is critical for this territory to ensure that our young people, whether they move internationally or move to Sydney, Melbourne or Brisbane, come back to Canberra. If they do not do so, we are going to see an acceleration of the ageing population, which is already an issue.
We are faced with critical skills shortages. Political mileage is occasionally made on that at territory or federal levels, but the real concern we have to address is that, if we cannot solve that problem, we will start to damage the economic viability of our territory. As Mr Seselja pointed out, we will be potentially faced with a lower number of workers supporting a greater number of retirees with this ageing population and we are going to have to be clever in working out how to deal with these challenges. We have to take into account the fact that not only are we losing highly educated young people but also we are going to have a large number of people taking advantage of public sector superannuation schemes. These people can still make contributions to our community and to business and other activities here, but we need to work out ways of harnessing their contributions.
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