Page 3984 - Week 13 - Tuesday, 17 November 2015
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This leads me to the final day of the mission and our time in Tokyo, where we completed our 2015 program of bond investor meetings. The organisations we met with were asset managers Prudential Investment Management and Daiwa Asset Management, and life insurance companies Nippon Life Insurance and Dai-Ichi Frontier Life Insurance.
We have received strong positive feedback from our program of bond investor meetings, including a sense of increased awareness and improved understanding of the ACT and a positive view of the government’s borrowing strategy and objectives which are supported by the territory’s stable AAA credit rating and the government’s budget plans. Our growing debt financial markets presence, increasing number of benchmark bonds and improving liquidity and investor diversity are anticipated to continue to support our future bond issuance requirements.
In closing, Madam Deputy Speaker, I express my sincere thanks and appreciation for the success of this delegation to those we met—the Invest Canberra team in the economic development directorate, the Canberra Business Chamber and the ACT Exporters Network. I thank them for all their assistance in making this a very successful trade mission. I present the following paper:
Ministerial delegation to USA and Japan—October 2015—Ministerial statement, 17 November 2015.
I move:
That the Assembly take note of the paper.
Question resolved in the affirmative.
Apprenticeships
Ministerial statement
MS BURCH (Brindabella—Minister for Education and Training, Minister for Police and Emergency Services, Minister for Disability, Minister for Racing and Gaming and Minister for the Arts) (11.05): For the information of members I make the following ministerial statement on the importance of Australian apprenticeships for the future workforce of the ACT. In the ACT, as in the rest of the country, we depend on apprentices and trainees in all aspects of our daily lives. From health professionals to the people who build our homes and roads, to those who run our favourite restaurants and cafes or ensure our offices and shops run smoothly, just to name a few, we all rely on quality outcomes of Australian apprenticeship programs. Our local businesses, especially small and medium enterprises, rely on apprentices and trainees to meet their skills needs.
At a national level, apprenticeships and traineeships have been the focus of major reform. A new national body, the Australian Industry Skills Committee, has been established to oversee training product development and to ensure that the proposed reforms to training packages are applied consistently and meaningfully.
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