It’s time to tap into resources beyond those under the red dirt of Western Australia and build a Commonwealth based on skills and human energy rather than look to paper wealth that has all the stability of the next margin call.
Look no further than the latest figures from ICCA, the international conference industry association, which shows that Australia has slipped dramatically in recent times.
The year Sydney hosted the Olympics the city was the world’s leading destination for international conferences. The 2007 figures from ICCA show that Sydney (and Australia) does not even figure in the top 20 cities. Our Asia Pacific region has no fewer than five in the top 20, with Kuala Lumpur sitting proudly in 19th spot, less than three years after its international convention centre was opened. They’ve aggressively gone out to win business and it’s clearly paid off.
We live in a democracy where the market rather than government dictates what the next priorities for development should be and that is as it should be. Governments do have a responsibility to look at the bigger picture and help put in place the building blocks on which infrastructure development can go forward. We see the bodies such as major events organisations being part of this process to progress our industry.
There is just no reason why we should be experiencing the bottlenecks that exist in the conference and events sector right now. When 50 bulk-carriers are hanging around off the coast due to lack of cargo-loading facilities, the lack of infrastructure is obvious to all. But when cities are losing conferences because of a shortage of hotels, meeting rooms and quality exhibition space, those losses are less obvious but just as significant to the general economy.
We run the risk of losing our best and brightest to those powerhouse economies overseas if we don’t take stock, provide the infrastructure, and once again make our cities exciting and stimulating destinations for meetings and events.
We still have a strong point of difference from many of those Asian cities in that our cities are clean, especially when it comes to air quality, and in the main we offer a wider range of attractions and cultural activities. In many instances we’re now highly competitive from a pricing perspective, so there really is nothing but commitment to stop our leading conference cities from becoming world leaders once again.
Sydney will only have one five-star hotel built in this decade and even that isn’t in the city centre. Perth and Brisbane are running with very high occupancy rates and there’s not of lot of will on the part of property developers to take the opportunities on offer. Some of this can be attributed to a scarcity of tradespeople and skilled operators to build and manage these enterprises. If ever there was a place for government to get on the front foot in terms of resourcing through education and skilled migration, this is it.
We are not a middle-ranked nation economically by any means. We’re the 14th largest economy in the world, a remarkable achievement given the size of our landmass and the puny population numbers we have to sustain it. We offer a good quality of life for just about everyone who chooses to participate in our economy, even though there are challenges that sometimes seem intractable.
The events and hospitality sector is an industry that facilitates so much more than its own perpetuation. Well-designed conferences add much to a country’s “social capital”, something that goes well beyond the dollars and cents that derive from an influx of foreign exchange.
Bruce MacMillan, the head of MPI, a global association for conference organisers alluded to this recently while visiting Sydney. He was saying that the cities of Toronto and Vancouver had gained invaluable social capital by hosting the mega world AIDS conferences. The clinicians and health workers in both cities are now regarded as the best in the world for their overall skill at managing the disease, thanks to the expertise they’d learnt from visiting delegates to those conferences.
Perhaps it’s time to look beyond the parochialism of state politics and embrace a vision that builds surely on our Commonwealth.
For more information, contact Bryan Holliday at ICMS Australasia at
02 9254-5000. www.icmsaust.com.au
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