Page 2697 - Week 09 - Tuesday, 16 September 2014
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These projects were also the focus of further one-on-one meetings with other large investors—Comfort Delgro, and Temasek, a global portfolio investment company backed by the Singaporean government.
Another infrastructure-related connection was with the Singapore sports hub. This recently completed 25-hectare site in the centre of Singapore includes a new 55,000-seat indoor national stadium, a 6,000-seat aquatic facility, a 3,000-seat indoor arena, a range of community sports facilities and 41,000 square metres of commercial retail space.
Integrated into the mass rapid transit network, this public-private partnership delivered facility provides a great example of what can be achieved for a community with vision and persistence and certainly provides a very good guide to the development of our own city to the lake project. It is important to note that the government will continue to seek investment in the city to the lake project. I will be undertaking further trade missions into South-East Asia in particular, to continue that focus.
The government have announced that we will continue work on city to the lake and the priority in the next five years remains with development of the West Basin waterfront boardwalk, footpaths, cycle paths and recreation spaces, and, indeed, the new city pool. The site for a new stadium is not available until a new pool is built and the timing of this obviously is subject to further budget considerations and private investor interest.
Of course, these large projects represent significant investment opportunities for many overseas organisations. Accordingly, attracting investment is an ever-present focus during missions such as these.
Following on from the delegation to Singapore, I travelled to Hong Kong, where I led an Austrade-supported roundtable investment forum at which we presented a range of investment opportunities, including capital metro and city to the lake, to more than a dozen decision-makers from Hong Kong investment organisations. We also took the opportunity to deliver a comprehensive presentation on the ACT economy to a range of high-level finance industry representatives from across the region, raising awareness of the potential opportunities for international financiers via ACT bonds.
I completed my week with a visit to Huawei’s headquarters in Shenzhen. This is a truly amazing place, a facility that has more than 5,000 employees and that has been the driving force in the growth of Shenzhen, a city now of more than 10 million people that as recently as 1979 had a population of just over 300,000.
In conclusion, these delegations are about establishing strong and enduring connections between Canberra and interested and like-minded organisations in Singapore and Hong Kong. Whilst we are a small city, and in some ways we are really at the beginning of an internationalisation journey, there is no doubt that interest in our city is strong and the willingness to engage with us is real.
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