Page 4011 - Week 13 - Wednesday, 30 October 2013
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bringing more visitors to our hotels and restaurants. It will also help diversify our economy and allow the ACT to leverage off its competitive advantages in research and learning.”
It goes on to say:
For over five years—
this is the Canberra Business Council—
we have been suggesting that the best way to ensure Canberra gets a world-class convention centre is to establish an independent body that is of government, but sits outside of government. This body would be responsible for planning, implementing and possibly even managing the Australia Forum.
Mr Assistant Speaker, this is an important project, and it is an important project that is not getting the attention that it deserves from the government. You only need to look at what is happening in other jurisdictions to understand that other governments get it and the ACT government does not. In the time that we have been debating this over the last 12 years, for instance, the Melbourne convention centre doubled in size. Adelaide has had a refurbishment and is about to have another one, and the third refurbishment for Adelaide is larger than what is proposed in the Australia forum document. That is how important the business events market is to the people of South Australia.
But the shining example is what the New South Wales government is about to do. In December the convention centre at Darling Harbour will be shut and demolished and the New South Wales government, the New South Wales economy, will not have a large-scale convention centre for three to four years. Why? Because the New South Wales government understands that to be competitive it needs a bigger and better convention centre, and it needs it now. It is willing to take the short-term hit so that it can have a long-term facility that matches the stature of Sydney.
So they will not have a convention centre. Imagine if we had got our act together and the government had built a new convention centre for the ACT. We would be in such a good position to capitalise on that closure. But we are not. And the failure is the government’s.
Canberra means “meeting place”. We are Canberra by name; we should be Canberra by nature. People should think of us as the meeting place, well beyond the meeting place of the federal parliament. We are home to five universities, including two of the best universities that are totally based here, in the form of the ANU and the University of Canberra. We are home to the premier headquarters of the premier research organisation in the country, the CSIRO. We are home to all of the federal departments. We are home to the federal parliament itself. We are home to the diplomatic community. So if you want to come to a prestigious city, a prestigious site that can give you so many different venues, whether it be the national parliament, the cultural institutions or the backdrop of the lake, often you cannot come to the ACT because our convention centre is not up to it.
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