Page 3807 - Week 12 - Wednesday, 29 October 2014
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The Sensis survey shows that the support of small and medium-size enterprises in the territory for ACT government policies was the highest support from small and medium-size enterprises for any state or territory government policies in the country. The ACT has the second lowest unemployment rate and the second highest participation rate in our labour market.
In the 2014-15 fiscal year the territory government will invest nearly $5 billion in delivering services for the people of Canberra and make a $735 million investment in infrastructure as part of a $2.5 billion infrastructure package over four years. There has been exceptional growth in exports, particularly service exports from this economy in recent years. Exports are now worth $1.3 billion a year, up from $774 million a little over 10 years ago. The ACT’s share of national exports has increased from around 1.6 per cent to nearly 2½ per cent in 2013.
There are now 25,000 businesses operating in the territory, double where they were in 1995. We are one of only two jurisdictions in Australia and only one of 26 worldwide that have a AAA stable credit rating from Standard & Poor’s. There are 212,000 people currently employed in the territory, with nearly 5,000 jobs being created in the last four years alone, at a time when the largest employer has been contracting.
We have seen more than 35,000 new jobs created in the territory in the past decade, equating to almost 10 jobs every day for 10 years. The ACT economy was worth $34.4 billion in 2012-13, and has been growing at nearly a billion dollars a year since 2000-01.
We have the best educated community in Australia. We lead the nation in NAPLAN results, and Canberrans are twice as likely to hold post-graduate qualifications as other Australians. The strong growth in our territory’s knowledge economy and associated industries in recent years has seen more than 43,000 people employed across education, scientific, technical and the ICT sectors, with more than 6,000 new jobs created in these industries in the last decade.
Our higher education sector is growing strongly. The sector currently employs around 45,000 people in the region, educating about 40,000 students, one quarter of whom are from overseas. Our tourism sector generates around $1.8 billion in economic activity for the economy, and employs nearly 17,000 people. Our gross per capita income was $97,269 in the 2012-13 fiscal year, which is nearly $40,000 more than the national per capita average of just under $57½ thousand.
The ACT has a much more even distribution of income compared to the national average as measured by the Gini coefficient. In the ACT it is 0.373 and in Australia it is 0.427. The higher the number in this measure, the greater the level of inequality.
The strength of research and development in the territory continues to be enhanced. More than eight per cent of Australia’s higher education institutional expenditure on R&D takes place in our city, and as a proportion of GDP, Canberra’s rate of higher education R&D expenditure outstrips that of all Australian jurisdictions by a factor greater than three.
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