Page 2539 - Week 07 - Wednesday, 1 August 2018
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Centre tracks space debris using lasers and is developing technology strategies to remove debris into the atmosphere or away from space infrastructure.
The government has a strong track record of supporting the space industry and innovation, which gives us a further competitive advantage for being the home of our national space industry. The government’s economic diversification strategy is already working and can deliver for the ACT’s economy and its residents by taking advantage of the areas we excel in. We specialise in cutting-edge fields of space law. Ms Le Couteur mentioned space ethicists, and a lot of space lawyers are required to support our nation’s space industry. There are also many other supportive industries here in Canberra that will help Australia to achieve its ambitions in space.
We are also the home of our national government and overseas missions which are at the centre of public administration nationally and internationally and which will support Space Agency administration and international collaboration efforts. While Canberra does not currently support a high-volume manufacturing sector, we excel in more specialised fields of manufacturing. Our workforce is very highly skilled. We have the best science university in the nation, which is already the home to an excellent astronomy and astrophysics faculty, not to mention the impending construction of the second UNSW Canberra campus, which will augment UNSW’s space division.
We are also home to the CSIRO, which recruits the nation’s best scientists and whose close proximity to the national Space Agency will benefit. The location of these critical institutions in Canberra is part of the reason we have the capacity to excel in industries that are low volume and highly technical. We may not be able to send rockets to space from Canberra at a low enough cost, but we can engineer and manufacture the advanced satellites that make up their payload.
The ACT space industry goes hand in hand with the ACT government’s economic diversification strategy, which seeks to draw science and tech investment to Canberra. For example, the ACT government’s $1.35 million grant to Seeing Machines in last year’s budget kicked off our trial of electric vehicle technology in Canberra, drawing industry stakeholders and relevant engineers here. Likewise, provisions in the ACT government’s renewable energy sourcing contracts mandate that bases of operations and workers be located in the ACT. This has helped to give the ACT a comparative technological and skills advantage over states that are only catching up with us in regard to renewable energy.
It is a joint recognition that the ACT may not be able to out-produce other jurisdictions but we can outsmart them. Indeed, the ACT is already home to a quarter of the country’s total space industry jobs, so it makes sense to consolidate this with the national Space Agency being located in a field in which we have strength, rather than starting somewhere else anew, especially given that the ACT government is already actively supporting its space industry, whereas other states will only be beginning the process of grants and subsidies should they win the bidding process.
The $250,000 package we announced last Friday is only the latest in the ACT government’s support for the local space industry. We have already invested
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