Page 466 - Week 02 - Wednesday, 21 February 2018
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will see the addition of around 8,000 extra jobs. Defence expenditure stimulates employment across many sectors in the Canberra region, including transport, retail trade, construction and the professional and technical services sector.
The ACT government values the skills and experience that our defence workforce brings to the economy, including recent veterans, who have an enormous amount to contribute after their active military careers. Many of these skills are now finding their way into new businesses in Canberra and helping us to build the industries of the future. Our intent is to foster the positive social aspects and impacts from defence innovation undertaken by our defence companies and our education and research institutions.
From world leaders like Electro Optic Systems, this means, for example, using tracking lasers to map and understand space debris and protect our satellite services. For the University of Canberra, it means expanding military-focused human performance research into fall prevention technologies for the elderly. And at CEA Technologies, their new workforce is being trained in technical precision manufacturing. We also acknowledge that our defence industry plays an important role in providing humanitarian capabilities. For example, Aspen Medical delivers maternal and child health care in developing nations and is at the forefront of major international medical responses, including the 2014-15 Ebola crisis in West Africa. They are a couple of snapshots showing the important role that the defence industry plays in the ACT.
There are further examples where defence-related industries in the territory are working to support a range of other really important outcomes. This includes in cyberspace and technology where organisations like QuintessenceLabs are doing work that is related to the defence industry but also helps a range of organisations in how their data is collected, communicated and stored, using a blend of advanced cybersecurity and quantum technology.
Our defence industry is an important part of the territory economy and has significant spillovers into other areas of economic and social activity in our city. It is naive in the extreme to confine debate around defence industries in the ACT to the manufacture of weapons. It is much broader than that. In fact, the ACT’s strengths are not in those areas, but in the areas I have mentioned this morning and similar areas.
Having said that, I commend Mr Pettersson for his motion and thank those who have contributed in a positive way to this debate about the territory’s economic future.
MR PETTERSSON (Yerrabi) (11.10), in reply: Thank you to all the members who contributed to this debate today. There were more speakers than I expected.
In judging our government’s economic leadership, the results speak for themselves. The ACT has the lowest unemployment rate in the country, at 3.7 per cent. Over the past year, 10,000 new jobs were created, 8,000 of which were full time. It is an incredible result that is worth repeating time and time again: 80 per cent of them were full time. Private sector job growth remained strong, with an annual increase of
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