One week after tragic earthquakes cancelled Canberra’s first trade mission to Wellington, The Shaker sat down with Brendan Smyth.

As the former leader of the ACT Liberals and the Commissioner for International Engagement under the current local Labor government, Brendan is uniquely positioned to recognise many of the opportunities for Canberra business in 2017.

Such a shame about the Wellington trip – for so many reasons!

Oh, absolutely. It was heartbreaking. Of course, there is no need to go self-promoting in the middle of a natural disaster – that was immediately obvious. However, stepping back from that, it was disappointing to lose the momentum that was building ahead of the trip. We had some great people work very hard on that mission, and to have it cancelled was so disappointing.

There were 80 Canberrans paying their own way to be a part of the week’s activities. It demonstrated an incredible level of engagement, and how well Canberrans are getting behind our engagement strategy.

That said, we were more than willing to offer any assistance that our friends in New Zealand required during a very tough time.

 

 

In September, you launched Canberra’s International Engagement Strategy. A lot of the content ties in nicely with the broader Federal innovation strategy. Rather than focus on just science, technology, engineering and Maths (STEM), you’ve also included the arts as a pillar.

Absolutely. That’s an important part of the philosophy of building Canberra.

This is an amazing city – one they I have worked to promote almost all my adult life. But what is it that makes this just a great place to live? It’s the arts – the fact that we live in a beautiful city with fantastic design and a highly- creative population.

 

How do you see that fitting in with STEM?

Well, we call it STEaM. I truly believe that the arts provide a foundation for economic development.

(at this point, Mr Smyth darts out of the meeting room and back to his office. Moments later, he returns with a well-thumbed copy of David Throsby’s The Economics of Cultural Policy, which almost falls open to the desired page)

Throsby was a great Australian economist, and he truly believed this idea. This book features a great line which, I believe, ties this sort of thinking together.

A logical sequence can be established beginning with art and proceeding through artistic creativity, creativity in general, which leads innovation and technical progress, competitive advantage and lead, in due course, to growth in income, exports, employment and other indicators of economic success.

Now, Canberra doesn’t have mining, it doesn’t have manufacturing, and we don’t have agriculture…and we must face the fact that we never will. In the absence of these primary industries, Canberra needs to find another path to economic success.

 

 

So what have we got?

If you compare us to Washington DC – which we’re loosely based on, the similarities are still present. When founded in 1790, it was decided that the city would be a place of education, governance, the arts, and commerce.

A century later, when he laid Canberra’s foundation stone, Andrew Fisher repeated those words – although he left out ‘commerce’… (laughs) I guess like all good Labor Prime Ministers do!

Now, we’ve done governance to death, and we’ve only discovered education as an economic asset in the last 20 years. Much of the education revolution is ahead of us.

But what is going to drive the economic exploitation of these assets. If you ask Throsby (and I tend to agree) it’s the arts that will provide inspiration for the huge innovations to come. You can have STEM – and that’s important – but it’s the arts that makes STEM liveable.

If you were to fly to your favourite city in the world tomorrow, I can bet it would be for the quality of its engineers. You’d be going there for the food, the music, museums, language and the architecture. It’s the cultural side that we are attracted to, and it is creativity and the arts that will underpin the new economy.

 

Looking at it from an innovation point of view, there are businesses that now run solely on an idea, a laptop and a wifi connection…

Absolutely. There are two important parts of that for us as a city. The first question is whether we have the infrastructure to allow that to happen, but also to remain attractive enough that those kinds of people who can live and work anywhere remain attracted to Canberra because of the lifestyle it provides.

It could be argued were well on the way… we have two percent of Australia’s population, yet register 10% of the IP.  Largely it comes out of our tertiary institutions, but also government bodies such as the CSIRO. That’s important innovation that adds a lot to the local economy and clearly represents a creative environment.

The underlying point is that we can become the most innovative and rich city in the world, but we must remain a liveable city. We need to maintain, and build on, the essence of Canberra… its soul.

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To read Part II of The Shaker's interview with Brendan Smyth, click here