Luke Gosling (Solomon, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I rise in continuation on Appropriation Bill (No. 3) 2017-2018 and Appropriation Bill (No. 4) 2017-2018. Yesterday evening I was talking about some of the challenges that we face in the northern capital of Australia, in Darwin, the place that I represent—Darwin and Palmerston. One of the challenges is to do with the population. We have a massive gas project called INPEX, and we've had 9,000 people—many fly-in fly-outs, but also about 3,500 local Territorians—working on that project. This year, that project is going to move out of the construction phase and into the operations phase, which means that we need to retain those people. If we lose those people, it affects our GST. If we lose those people, we won't be able to grow our northern capital.

The Chief Minister mentioned in a speech in Darwin this week that we've also seen a decline in the number of professional women living in Darwin. There are about a third less professional women coming into Darwin and an increase of about a third of professional women leaving Darwin. So that fewer blokes and fewer ladies, and certainly no way to build the population. It is a concern for us because, when we had some military units taken from Darwin and sent to Adelaide and to the east coast, our population dropped by about 1,500 people. That affected our GST revenue, which we're dependent on to provide services across the Northern Territory. We dropped something like $2 billion in revenue over the forward estimates. That's huge for our northern economy. We are trying in every way, but I think it's important, as leaders in our northern community, that we don't just outline the problem but that we also come up with solutions.

With some local businesspeople and some local entrepreneurs in Darwin, I've been very proud to be part of an initiative called Ideas Fest. We had the first one last year, which looked at supporting young entrepreneurs coming up with new business models. We provided mentors to help them to build their businesses. The next thing we did was to really home in on this issue of making Darwin a more attractive place for women, particularly young professional women, to come and live and work. We ran a women's ideas fest—held in a good establishment in Mitchell Street in Darwin which many, who have visited Darwin, may have gone to to have a good time—and we came up with a really great suite of ideas about how we can make our northern capital a more attractive place for professional women to come and live and work, but also to stay and to meet people, raise families and grow our northern capital.

Now we've turned our mind to tourism. The Tourism IdeasFest will be held at the Darwin International Airport on 3 March. The event is obviously sponsored by the airport but also by Tourism Top End and Tourism NT. We're very thankful for their support. The idea of the Tourism IdeasFest is to get ideas from Territorians—not only people in the sector but people outside of the sector who may have had amazing experiences as tourists overseas. We want to see if we can put a Territory spin on those ideas and then attract more and more people to visit and, indeed, put down roots in our northern capital. That's what we want to do: build our northern capital. I congratulate the NT government for their stimulus package for the tourism sector in recent times. I acknowledge that they're doing a lot of work to get the Chinese market happening. Thanks very much, Madam Deputy Speaker. Come up and visit the north.

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