Page 693 - Week 03 - Tuesday, 28 March 2006
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commercialising research, innovation and education. We need to stay ahead of the competition by deliberately turning ideas into assets.
In the last year our Knowledge Fund provided a total of $1.5 million to support 12 innovative Canberra companies. This funding helps create considerable commercialisation leverage and assists businesses at the time when they need to grow quickly, creating employment opportunities in areas such as information and communication technology, vermiculture, and the car and building industries.
As a community we all recognise that one of the big challenges we face at present is the skills shortage. While we continue to proudly boast Australia’s lowest unemployment rate, it comes at a cost. Like many other areas in Australia, we are lacking the range of skills needed to keep our economy as buoyant as we would wish. To this end, next week the ACT government, working in partnership with a range of groups, will launch a pilot project to actively promote Canberra as a great place to live and work. The campaign strategy is currently being finalised, but it is very heartening to see the willingness of the business community to put their money where their mouth is. Too often in the past governments have been expected to solve these problems on their own. How much better is it for a joint approach, a shared approach, to a significant problem?
The Canberra plan is, of course, not just about what the government is doing. To succeed it requires the government to work in partnership with the community and business to achieve our common aim of making Canberra a better place to live. To achieve this end we need to work not only with others in our community, but also people from other areas of Australia and around the world.
On 21 November 2005 the Vice-Mayor of Beijing and I signed the Memorandum of Understanding for Canberra-Beijing Cooperation in Water Projects. This high-level agreement between the ACT government and the People’s Government of Beijing Municipality establishes a collaborative framework for planning and implementing joint water related projects.
Similarly, recognising our partnership with our sister city, Nara, more than 5,000 people, including His Excellency Mr Hideaki Ueda, Ambassador for Japan, attended the Canberra Nara Candle Festival in October 2005. This event, as in previous years, attracted a high level of community participation. The government has also supported successful and continuing trade missions to the Middle East, the United States and Canada and a particularly successful mission to Ireland and the north of England.
In looking to Canberra’s future prosperity it is important to recognise our geographic position as an island within New South Wales. As Canberra has matured, particularly since self-government, cross-border issues have become increasingly important. Canberra, as the regional centre for the Australian capital region, provides a range of benefits and opportunities for south-east New South Wales residents in transport, education, health, retailing, research and tertiary industry. In return, the region provides many of the services Canberra is dependent on and helps support a higher level of activities, commerce and services than would otherwise occur. The mutual interdependencies in the region mean that there are significant benefits to both the New South Wales and ACT governments from a shared approach to the management of
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