Page 1767 - Week 06 - Tuesday, 6 June 2006
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will help the businesses that are already committed to this town grow to their full potential.
We are doing that by introducing sweeping reforms to our education system, reforms that will create clear pathways for students, preparing them for the jobs of the future, right here in the territory.
We are doing it by actively selling Canberra’s virtues as a place to work, with promising results from a pilot “live in Canberra” campaign.
We are creating simpler, clearer and more efficient organisational structures, scaled to the reality of a small city-state, and ready to support business.
We are simplifying the regulatory framework, and its administration too.
We are providing an extra $585,000 to continue reform of the planning system, to render it even simpler, faster and more effective. In this respect, supply reforms are just as crucial as demand reforms. Cabinet will be shortly considering the possibility of guaranteeing a set percentage of each year’s land release in the territory to the market.
Our expenditure on economic development will be brought into line with national averages, and the investments we make will be better targeted, to give greater dividends to the business and broader community.
The government will not make further investments in locally focused venture capital arrangements. We believe the market is now well served with our contributions to ANU Connect, the Canberra Business Development Fund and Epicorp. And we are pleased to see the Capital Angels Network—a private-sector-run investment network—now gathering momentum.
Marketing activities will be rationalised, to minimise duplication with commonwealth activity.
We will give business the things business tells us it needs: good information, good mentoring, good support. This budget provides an additional $1 million a year to extend and develop these services and functions, along the lines of the CanBAS model.
Mr Speaker, good governments help their communities build on their competitive advantages. Good governments make sure that they really know their communities inside out, so that those advantages are clear.
Today, I announce a strategic review of Canberra’s innovation systems and assets. This review will look at all the elements of the system and how they interact—enterprises, institutions, talent pools, the regulatory and support environments—and how we might better capitalise on these assets in new ways, led by the business community itself.
We will also develop an investment attraction strategy that will result in a suite of ‘prospectus-style’ marketing material, including online material, to help individual businesses in their own investment attraction activity.
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