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VECCI New Ideas Forum 2011

Monday 5th December 2011

VECCI New Ideas Forum 2011

I had the privilege of being invited to the VECCI New Ideas Forum 2011 where we had the chance to add our ideas to those already gathered by VECCI. They had opened an ideas portal on the Internet which was a great way to gather ideas. There were three categories for gathering information:

  • Business Futures
  • People Futures
  • Regional Futures
Victorian Parliament

Victorian Parliament

The forum was held at the Victorian Parliament. The ideas generation process took a few topics to really get going well and the initial spark came from a topic involving bicycles. After that the forum hit its stride and many hundreds of valuable contributions were made.

From my notes on the day, here are some of the topics discussed:

 

Business Futures

  • Enhancing government expenditure efficiency
  • Transport including east / west links and 24 hour freight
  • Progress on government reform
  • Lowering government costs
  • New sources of funding for local government
  • Transport – city and rural passenger and freight transport
  • Developing Port Phillip Bay for tourism, commercial, recreational and environmental
  • Air Transport – upgrading existing airports and adding a third airport in Melbourne’s south east
  • Sea Freight – adding container handling to Webb Dock and Port of Hastings

People Futures

  • Aligning work laws to work needs
  • Promote health services for export
  • Attracting overseas entrepreneurs
  • Retaining our best and brightest
  • Education reform in curriculum and governance
  • Minerals boom opportunities, especially skills development
  • Getting the best from our youth

Regional Futures

  • Technology shifts in how we live and work
  • Making our regions more investment ready
  • Strengthening regional project approvals
  • Understanding regional cost advantages
  • Promote regional natural assets
  • Regional event attraction
  • Decentralisation including government

So that is quite a few topics to be generating ideas on.

Dr Matthew Butlin

Dr Matthew Butlin

We also had a presentation from Dr Matthew Butlin on the topic of Keeping Victoria Competitive including key findings from the Victorian Competition and Efficiency Commission. They are looking 3 key areas:

 

  • Productivity
  • Competitiveness
  • Participation

There were some messages there that are hard to ignore including these ones I took note of:

  • Victoria has gone from the most efficient state to nearly the least efficient
  • Efficiency is currently negative, that is we are getting less efficient each year
  • Literacy and numeracy are declining
  • State taxation and regulatory reform must happen
  • State transport infrastructure must improve
  • Business focused innovation is the key and not Government driven innovation
Mark Stone

Mark Stone, VECCI Chief Executive

The session was wrapped up by VECCI Chief Executive, Mark Stone, who reiterated the need to be innovative and tackle some of the hard issues that have been left unaddressed for more than a decade including a third airport located to the south east of Melbourne.

So a lot of interesting topics and quite a bit of intellectual capital applied to them for the day. I’m looking forward to seeing what comes of it.

Successful Endeavours specialise in Electronics Design and Embedded Software Development. Ray Keefe has developed market leading electronics products in Australia for nearly 30 years. This post is Copyright © 2011 Successful Endeavours Pty Ltd

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