Page 1647 - Week 05 - Wednesday, 9 May 2018
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Rather than taking the soft option of kicking problems down the road, rather than taking the soft option of running our infrastructure into the ground, this government is taking the hard option on all of these issues. The challenge is vast. Our population has expanded by 34,000 people over the last five years. In the 12 months to September 2017, there were 7,165 more people in our city.
We also had over 10,000 new jobs created in our city last year. Importantly, 80 per cent of those jobs were full-time jobs, the sort of jobs that let people pay a mortgage, support their family, save for their retirement and have a high quality of life. Any old job is not good enough. We should be delivering good jobs for our community, and the Barr Labor government is doing just that.
Due to the wise leadership of our Treasurer, the ACT now has the lowest unemployment rate and highest average incomes in Australia. Rather than the downward spiral of lowering wages and profit stripping advocated by the Liberal Party, the Barr Labor government is delivering high wages and high growth for an inclusive economy.
There are great stories of growing businesses, large and small, across this city. The latest SGS Economics & Planning report on economic performance of Australia’s cities and regions showed that the highest contribution to Canberra’s GDP growth came from the professional services sector, at 2.7 percentage points. It accounted for almost 60 per cent of all growth in the period.
In cyber security, Canberra established the first operational node of the Australian cyber security growth network. Our companies are world leaders in system administration, secure cloud storage, security and cryptology. The 2018 Australian military sales catalogue showcases the products of an unprecedented nine Canberra defence companies.
Another example is Lockheed Martin Australia. The defence prime has an annual turnover of $293.8 million and has invested $12 million in a new headquarters in Canberra. Just last month two local cybersecurity success stories, Penten and QuintessenceLabs, announced a strategic partnership. Under the partnership, Penten’s spin-off, deception.ai, will use QuintessenceLabs’ random number generator technology in its new machine-learning platform. This is a great example of two Canberra companies collaborating to build market opportunities.
Of course, the confidence expressed by those businesses and many more in our city and our territory are not reflected everywhere. The federal Liberal government, and our second senator, Zed Seselja, have been trying their best to rip the guts out of our city. Fortunately, they have not been very competent at it. Maybe it comes with the party membership.
After the disastrous attempts to move government departments, last night they announced they would have a go at killing more local jobs. Unlike our commitment to develop a modern, efficient transport network, Zed cannot decide if he would like to take credit for the light rail, as he did in the media this morning, or sabotage it, as he
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