Page 1790 - Week 06 - Wednesday, 4 June 2014
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that is a bit of a critical mass issue as our population grows as well, but I think there is significant opportunity here where again government might look at the role it could play in making it easier for people to run events.
I would cite a small example of that, but it is one that illustrates perhaps how easily some things can be done that make a real difference. I refer to the Albert Hall and Yarralumla woolshed, which are owned by the Property Group. The Property Group has actually put in place an insurance policy where instead of an individual hirer having to take out public liability insurance of $20 million, Property Group has taken out the insurance policy and now just charges people a component of it.
They know that they have roughly a certain number of hires a year. The policy costs X amount. They have just divided it up and they charge it out to each person. That really saves people a lot of time, a lot of effort and probably quite a bit of expense in taking out their insurance policy. That means that people can put on a show, a performance or an event that will draw people. I do not want to overplay the significance of this example, but I think it is a good example of where government agencies can play an enabling role that facilitates that kind of diversification of activities going on in our city.
Finally, an area I would like to mention is local food production. I recently hosted a forum, a ministerial roundtable, of key stakeholders in the food production and food processing areas in the ACT. The objective of that was to try and increase the amount of food that is grown and processed in the ACT region. I did this under the auspices of being the ACT’s minister for primary industries through the TAMS portfolio. It is fair to say that we do not have a large number of primary producers in the ACT. It sits in the region of 160, give or take, depending on your definition. But it is a vibrant sector. There are some great opportunities there and I think there is opportunity again to expand that.
The issues raised there included things like the fact that there is not an abattoir in the region. People have to send any that they have grown quite some distances. That reduces the economics of it. So people were canvassing whether we could do something to change that. I am not sure whether it would be right in the ACT or somewhere in the region. But the question was: how can government play a role in facilitating that? How do we provide the marketplace where people can sell their produce? The local farmers markets have been incredibly successful. Are there other steps we can be taking? Again, there is a range of ideas there. It is never going to be the biggest sector in the ACT, but I do not think there is a single answer to this.
There are a series of areas in which we have considerable opportunity to expand the initiative and the innovation that is out there in our community by having confidence in Canberra—by government, in places, just facilitating things or removing roadblocks. The ACT government is never going to have huge buckets of money to splash about to industries. But I think a lot of what we can do is to enable, to remove barriers, to collaborate, to link people up. Those are the sorts of things I think the ACT government has to play to its capabilities on. We are a small town. A lot of us know each other, or we can pretty quickly introduce people to the right person. That is where, again, I think there are opportunities.
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