James Stevens (Sturt, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

It's a pleasure to contribute to this motion talking about the importance of the gaming sector, and I would like to slightly broaden my comments to include the creative industry sector as a whole. It is a great honour to have the South Australian Film Corporation based in my electorate and great companies like KOJO very involved in the postproduction and visual effects sector, which is of course what underpins the gaming sector and many others. South Australia has a great history and heritage in the creative sector, and we've got this unbelievable confluence of the creative sector coming together with other sectors like the defence sector and the cyber sector, where so many of these skills are required into the future. It's definitely going to be an enormous growth sector, and the most important thing for us in this sector is to make sure we're getting the workforce training right. And that's why we've got to talk about all these sectors in a combined way.

It's very exciting in South Australia because the two major naval shipbuilding projects both have an enormous amount of workforce requirements and therefore training and expertise from the companies in the area of virtual reality. We've got both of the programs operating on effectively a virtual shipyard platform. So the submarines and frigates will effectively be designed with people who have the same skill set who are needed to contribute to the gaming sector. Instead of the old blueprints and the big sheets of paper on the boardroom table, everything is now in the computer, in the cloud, on the device that you might wear for virtual reality representation of all the different elements of these boats that are being built. So it's a really exciting time in South Australia for the gaming industry because we've got the workforce requirements that are dramatically increasing, and of course there will be a spectacular cross-pollination between the workforce requirements in defence, in cyber, in the film sector—streaming—and the gaming sector.

I would like to give a quick shout-out to a couple of great companies from Adelaide, Mighty Kingdom and Team Cherry, who are already doing excellent work in the gaming sector. And I mentioned KOJO before. They are based at Kent Town in my electorate. There was a famous game called Mortal Kombat, and that movie has been made in South Australia. KOJO were enormously involved in the post-production, colouration et cetera of that, and I'm really excited about the premiere of that very soon. That's a company that is in an allied sector to gaming and is doing excellent work in developing that skilled workforce in South Australia to contribute more generally to the creative industry sector.

There is already good support for the gaming sector from both the Commonwealth government and the state government. The state government in South Australia, which the mover of the motion mentioned, has a rebate scheme in place for gaming. Obviously these rebate schemes are helpful; I don't disagree with that. But also at the Commonwealth level we are doing a lot of things generally—tax incentives, R&D incentives, export market development grants et cetera—that are opportunities for the gaming industry to use that Commonwealth support to access export markets. I see a very exciting future for the gaming sector and probably the creative sector in this country and in particular in South Australia.

As I say, we've got a whole range of things coming together at once that can provide some critical mass in this sector. It's a huge sector. As has already been pointed out, it's much bigger than the film and music industries combined. That's why we need the industry economies of scale and the workforce capabilities in place as well as support from the state and Commonwealth governments to see this industry grow. I'm very confident that it will. The mover mentioned eSports. Again, I know that in my home state, with the upgrade of the tennis facility on Memorial Drive, there's going to be the capability of holding major eSports events at that venue. We're building the venues and the infrastructure. We're making sure that we're training the workforce. The support is in place across the state and federal governments to give this sector, and the creative sectors more broadly, the opportunity to thrive. There are exciting milestones on the horizon. I can see this being a sector that is going to grow very significantly over the next few years and decades to come, and that's thanks to the support and the programs of the Commonwealth and state governments in South Australia and Australia.

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