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Legislative Assembly
 
Public Accounts and Estimates Committee: budget estimates 2016-17

21 February 2018
Statements on reports
FRANK McGUIRE  (ALP)

 


Mr McGUIRE (Broadmeadows) (10:22:05) — I refer to the Public Accounts and Estimates Committee inquiry into the budget estimates for 2016–17 and particularly to the contribution by the Minister for Industry and Employment, who referred to how working in collaboration presents an opportunity to drive strategic results. I want to continue my contribution on the need to place critical issues in the national interest above partisanship. This is important not only at the state level but also in our relations with the Australian government, and it is particularly relevant to the roles I have as Parliamentary Secretary for Medical Research and Parliamentary Secretary for Small Business and Innovation.

Today I want to highlight the benefits of a strategy that I have proposed to maximise innovation where it is needed most. To place this strategy in context:

Australia is in a $1.6 trillion global innovation race, where the prize at stake is a bigger share of global wealth, better jobs and the best access to the products of innovation …

Innovation is essential to create more economic and social opportunities. With the resources investment boom easing and our population ageing, Australia needs to find new sources of growth and improve productivity to maintain our standard of living. The Australia 2030: Prosperity through Innovation report states:

The biggest growth opportunities will come from knowledge-intensive companies that innovate and export, as they are the most profitable, competitive and productive. These companies will increasingly need to solve global problems at scale. When they succeed, they will make a substantial contribution to new jobs growth in Australia. This will come through both direct employment and indirect jobs throughout the economy from companies in their supply chain or in the service economy for their workers.

Innovation will also be critical to the employment market in Australia in 2030. Despite present fears about automation eradicating jobs, by 2030 a shortage of workers is a more likely problem than a shortage of jobs.

That is a critical proposition being put forward by the Australia 2030 report on how we need to drive innovation, but I want to actually pick up a gap in this report which I think is critical — that is, it does not really talk about place-based initiatives around innovation. I want to highlight that in Europe they have already spent about €100 billion on place-based innovation centres. This is a critical proposition that Australia needs to drive.

The Australian government might respond that they have a regional investment and jobs project, but the problem is that it has largely been a mechanism for pork-barrelling. This is the issue that I have highlighted previously in the report Creating Opportunity: Postcodes of Hope, published in 2016, where I called for redevelopment zones — or maybe we just call them jobs zones — to actually highlight where we can maximise these benefits.

Melbourne's north offers a critical proposition. Then we have Geelong, and you would look at the Latrobe Valley as a third such centre that could be harnessed. Geelong already has a city deal announced. This is why I am proposing that, given that one in 20 Australians is going to be living in Melbourne's north within two decades — that is the prediction — Melbourne's north is where we have the most benefit to be gained from these investments. Within 20 years this region is expected to match the current population size of Adelaide. It boasts Australia's largest concentration of advanced manufacturing and the most affordable and available land for development, it is within close proximity to the heart of the city and it has blue-chip infrastructure. This goes to the critical need to put innovation hubs where they are needed most.

The other policy issue I want to raise is that there is a skew for innovation investment to be done through universities. I think we need to put universities where the firms are too. Again, this proposition works brilliantly in Melbourne's north in its designated capital, Broadmeadows, because we have the Ford site, we have the Ericsson site, we have CSL, we have Visy and we have the Irish innovators Kingspan. Here are all these sites where we can look at attracting universities to be a partner, and I am trying to drive that as chair of the Broadmeadows Revitalisation Board. I am calling for greater collaboration at state and federal levels to actually change the so-called postcodes of disadvantage to again become postcodes of hope.

As we go through deindustrialisation, what are the new industries, what are the new jobs and how do we harness innovation? And how do we do it at the world's best proposition? The whole strategy around taking care of a place-based strategy is now critical, and that is why we need a city deal for Melbourne's north. Now that the one for Geelong has been announced I think the next logical one is Melbourne's north, four times the population size of Geelong.