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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2003 Week 14 Hansard (9 December) . . Page.. 5029 ..

MS DUNDAS (continuing):

The economic white paper in itself put forward a whole lot of statistics and analyses about the future of the territory, the situations that we are working towards and the demographic changes that we have to deal with. It is disappointing to see that all the action components that come out of this do not mesh with the problems that are identified in these demographic changes.

One of the tables clearly shows that there is a population bubble when people come to the territory for educational opportunities but then leave. Did the people who developed the economic white paper talk to students about why they leave the territory? This was identified as an issue in the discussion paper, but the issue of whether or not students are able to find accommodation or jobs appears to have disappeared from the paper.

We need to look at what is going on and talk about how we need to step up our land release program and those kinds of things. Were students spoken to about this matter? Did we talk to young people and ask them why they leave the territory? ABC Radio was able to do that the day after the economic white paper came down, so it is disappointing to find that the people who developed the economic white paper were not able to do that.

The white paper overlooked new industries that could diversify our employment base, such as agriculture or light manufacturing. These jobs were put forward in the non-urban study; but, again, they seem to have been totally ignored in the white paper.

The focus on more jobs for the highly educated could mean more people migrating to the ACT for work, while the current jobless continue to stay in the dole queue. The draft social plan talks about all Canberrans reaching their potential, and I think the economic white paper should have been able to facilitate this. The foundation of the Canberra plan is meant to be sustainability, so I am disappointed that there are no signs that the white paper process generally attempted to assess the environmental impact of the industries selected for promotion. For example, I doubt that the defence or space industries would score highly on a ranking of environmental sustainability.

I was also concerned about the proposal for venture capital and the venture capital fund. I believe that the ACT government could make better use of public money and use less of it if they helped new businesses prepare prospectus documents to attract private capital rather than entering joint ventures using taxpayers' money.

We know about consecutive ACT government records of perhaps not supporting the most well-picked winners. At the white paper launch and today the Treasurer listed a number of failed government business ventures that he has had to shut down. So even if the new venture capital fund were managed by an investment company, I suspect that cabinet would then insist on a final say about which business proposals attract funding. I fear that this is likely to result in more expensive mistakes.

If the government is serious about wanting our region to become another regional technology powerhouse like Cambridge or Bangalore, it needs to realise that these success stories resulted from governments facilitating venture capital investment, not directly providing the capital themselves. We should avoid making expensive mistakes and losing millions of dollars of taxpayers' money and should focus on capacity

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