Sharon Grierson (Newcastle, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I am delighted to stand and speak further to my previous speech about the achievements of this first year of the Rudd government and extend it to the future agenda for the electorate of Newcastle. I would like to lay out some of the areas we have succeeded in and where we will be building on our strengths in the future. One of the good things that Newcastle has done—and fortunately I have been able to work with our stakeholders for the last seven years very successfully—has been to build the knowledge base of our economy. Manufacturers were some of the first people to take on quality standards and to position themselves as a knowledge based industry. Of course, the challenge for them in the future, as in the whole nation, is to increase exports. That is an area I look forward to working on with them in my electorate.

We have certainly built a knowledge base around clean energy at CSIRO Newcastle, the energy flagship in the Energy Division, and at Newcastle University. Since we started a couple of years ago working towards a more sustainable economy, we certainly have seen CSIRO strengthened with the National Solar Institute to be put there, and Newcastle University has set up a clean energy research centre. BHP, unfortunately, has closed its technology centre, but we are negotiating as hard as we can to see if there is a possibility to keep them involved in the clean energy research sector in Newcastle, and I hope that those talks can progress satisfactorily. It is important now that we have our research entities in Newcastle working so well that we do attract more partnerships with national, regional and international corporations.

In the field of medical research, we are very hopeful that Hunter Medical Research Institute will receive the infrastructure funding it does need in the future. We know there are competing needs, but it is a well-established medical research institute, it is a collaboration between Newcastle University and the Hunter New England Area Health Service, and through that partnership they make changes through research to clinical practice. For example, its discoveries in asthma research in Newcastle have led to millions of dollars per annum savings on the PBS. Its work on stroke and the handling of stroke patients has seen a reduction in bed days for patients, so it is important that our medical research area be funded and embedded into our community.

We also do want to continue to showcase innovation, and I pay tribute to Neville Sawyer particularly, who guided the very successful Newcastle innovation festival this year around clean energy and the work we are doing there. Neville was also one of the people who set up the Hunter Founders Forum to showcase new companies and to link with financial institutions for venture capital opportunities.

Another area of research in our region that we are very proud of is the work of the Hunter Valley Research Foundation. It recently gave a presentation at a breakfast where the speaker was Wayne Swan, the Treasurer, and it emphasised that one of the things holding back our region is our retention rates. Although many of our young students continue on to a TAFE place, a training place or into work, unfortunately our take-up of tertiary education, higher education places at university, is not high enough. That is certainly an area in which I look forward to working with the Hunter Valley Research Foundation and our education institutions to see what we can do as part of the education revolution to bring our most needy students up to the level we want them to be and certainly to have the take-up of university places increased. I think the policies that were announced by the Deputy Prime Minister are going to be very much central to that.

The next challenge for our city is its sustainability as an economic entity, a social entity and a survivable entity. Having gone through the June storms in 2007 and seeing Queensland suffering the same sort of extreme weather event, I think we are accepting that these events are going to continue more regularly and that there has to be some review of our cities under the Major Cities unit. Part of that will be not only the way cities function but the way they survive some of the challenges thrown to us by climate change in the future.

Part of that challenge for the sustainability of the economy of the city of Newcastle is building up its service sector, and I look forward to a Federal Court building being constructed in our area. We are the next cab off the rank, so for the city of Newcastle there is a great future. I think the forward planning and projections are excellent.