Page 1479 - Week 04 - Wednesday, 28 March 2012
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . . Video
Continued support of organisations like the AIE by the government and an industry strategy for the Canberra game industry are warranted. This is an innovative sector and the ACT is capable of being an important player. Mr De Margheriti and the AIE understand this; hence their investments in seeding microbusinesses and scholarships. We should not let this opportunity slip past, and I commend this motion to the Assembly.
DR BOURKE (Ginninderra—Minister for Education and Training, Minister for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Affairs, Minister for Industrial Relations and Minister for Corrections) (6.06): I thank Mr Seselja for moving this motion because the intersection between entrepreneurship, innovation and education in Canberra is a keen interest of mine. How innovation gets going, how people come together to pool skills, ideas and resources to invent and eventually commercialise technology is completely fascinating.
A new opportunity opens from an idea, excitement builds around the potential of a new application, a collective forms to push it forward, capital is injected and the idea becomes a commercial reality. Firms and companies appear to seize the opportunities offered to apply new technology for profit. As an industry builds up around the technology and uptake in society approaches saturation, the entrepreneurs and innovators move off to find and develop the next big thing.
Currently there is perhaps nowhere else that this process is more central and more important than in the software development industry. Whereas innovation in hardware technology used to be the focus, now, with the proliferation of cheap processors and the ubiquity of smart devices, it is increasingly software sired applications that are the cutting edge when it comes to modern computing.
Again, I am thankful that Mr Seselja has given us the opportunity to speak about a modern sector of our community that continues to build under this Labor government. In Canberra we have literally dozens of companies, including training organisations like AIE, which are heavily involved in software design and development. They are all an integral part of Canberra’s burgeoning ICT sector.
In fact, Canberra stands out as the city with the greatest intensity of ICT-related employment in Australia, with a large section of our workforce—12,000 people, in fact—working in the sector. It is well known that Canberra boasts a number of internationally renowned ICT research organisations, multinational companies and many ICT small to medium enterprises with very strong research and innovation capabilities.
We are home to some of the country’s largest ICT research and development organisations, including our universities, CSIRO, and the Canberra Research Laboratory of NICTA, the National ICT Centre of Excellence. Being physically within a geographic centre of excellence such as Canberra with its educated professional population, youthful population immersed in modern computing, this enables a training firm like AIE to increase their absorptive capacity, giving them ready access to the knowledge and skills of some of the best talents worldwide.
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . . Video