Page 125 - Week 01 - Wednesday, 14 December 2016
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As I outlined yesterday in the Assembly, this is fundamental to the long-term economic future of the territory. We will not grow wealthy or wealthier as a community by buying and selling from each other. A city of 400,000 people lacks the capital and lacks the economic base on which to grow wealthy if we do not engage with the rest of the Australian economy and, even more importantly, the global economy.
The most important statistic contained within all of the positive figures that are outlined in Ms Cody’s motion, which I draw members’ attention to, is at dot point (1)(c)(vi), which says:
service exports have increased by 65 percent since 2010 …
That is service exports from the ACT, what we are selling to the rest of the world. They have increased by 65 per cent since 2010. The national increase over that period was 34 per cent. We are seeing ACT exporters. It is predominantly in services: we do not have a significant manufacturing base in this city; we are a service economy. But with what we are exporting, the diversity of those services continues to increase, the range of countries and new markets that we are selling those services to continues to increase, and the level of employment in those industries continues to increase. That is fundamentally important for the long-term economic health of this community.
I will focus on that and where the government can assist through infrastructure investment and through commercial partnership facilitation. The most practical example of this is the direct international flights to Canberra Airport. There has been investment from the airport in infrastructure, support from the territory government by way of tourism assistance, and persistence in relation to approaches to airlines to open up this destination for direct flights. That provides opportunities for freight from Canberra and the region to get into South-East Asia markets more quickly and more cost-effectively, and the tourism potential for this city is finally starting to be realised on a scale I think most people are not aware of.
The last 12 months saw the single largest number of international and domestic visitors in the history of the ACT visit Canberra. The single largest number of people ever visited the ACT, before the international flights started. This gives us a sense of the base on which we are building towards an economic contribution from the tourism sector of $2.5 billion to the territory economy by 2020. This sector employs 16,000 Canberrans. There are around 215,000 Canberrans in work, 16,000 of them in this sector alone.
The other stellar performance for the ACT has been higher education. Higher education exports, through our five universities and the Canberra Institute of Technology, have been growing faster than the rest of Australia, and employment in the education sector continues to grow strongly. It is our single largest export earner.
What has also been encouraging has been the growth in professional service exports. Many companies establish themselves in Canberra to sell to the Australian government. The Australian government is the single largest purchaser of goods and
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