Page 1482 - Week 04 - Wednesday, 28 March 2012
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . . Video
MS LE COUTEUR (Molonglo) (6.15): I also would like to thank Mr Seselja for moving this motion. I actually think this Assembly spends far too little time on IT issues. I suppose I am showing my prejudices here as a past IT person, but it is a very important industry in the ACT. I understand that about 10 per cent of the Canberra workforce is in ICT. That is the highest anywhere in Australia. The next highest is Victoria, which has five per cent of its population working in ICT.
ICT, as I said, is my background, even to the extent of its being my father’s background. As professor of physics at the ANU, he was responsible for introducing the first computer to Canberra. I had the privilege of being a student in the ANU’s first computing course back in the early 1970s.
As Dr Bourke and Mr Seselja have mentioned, ICT is very important in Canberra. I think we have all mentioned NICTA as one of the outstanding institutions. ICT is important for the whole economy. It is particularly important for a clean, green future. ICT is what has been fuelling productivity gains in our economy and our workforce for a very long time, and it is particularly relevant in terms of a potentially positive green future. What we can achieve with better management of things, better control of things, which ICT can give us, is in many, many cases vastly better energy efficiency.
If you look at all the new green buildings that are being built—the commercial ones rather than the household ones—they all have at their heart a building management system which will adjust things so that they work right. If you look at how our electricity system is going to be transformed, one of the major things in that is smart grids, grids which will adapt to the energy in and out. This is a computer process. If you look at a lot of the renewable energy technology—the wind turbines, advanced solar thermal—these are all controlled by computers. A major part of a positive future is ICT, and it is going to be a major part of a positive future for Canberra.
The reason we have such a high proportion of people working in ICT in Canberra is because of the federal government which, as we all know, is headquartered here. They employ a lot of people. But they do not employ everyone and it is really nice to be talking about one of the things that is not part of the federal government—the Academy of Interactive Entertainment.
In terms of this motion before us today, the games industry is a very specific part of the ICT sector with its own idiosyncrasies. It has the entertainment software sector, which has very different economic drivers from the business software sector. The business games industry in Australia is suffering at the moment because of our very strong Australian dollar. As a result of this, many large studios are downsizing or possibly even collapsing.
The market, of course, is changing, as we all know. It is moving away from big consoles. It is moving into smaller game developments, such as those for mobile phones. This means that games developers are also now moving towards starting up smaller studios which are more adaptable and more able to move into the types of games that are in demand.
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . . Video