New South Wales Premier Mike Baird spruiking the state to international business delegates that it’s the place to do business. Image: CeBIT Australia.
At a vast, globally recognised technology expo like CeBIT Australia 2016, you can leave it to keynote speakers to constantly relate the subject of technological development to the world of dating and how people communicate so differently compared to a few decades ago.
That’s how New South Wales Premier Mike Baird opened the conference in Sydney on 2nd May, 2016, saying that “it’s amazing how far technology has come”.
“I have been married for close to 30 years, and indeed when I first started dating my wife, there was no e-mail, no mobile phones, and we lived in separate cities for a while, she was in Perth, I was in Sydney, and we were only able to talk Sunday nights after 9pm because that’s when the phone calls were a lot cheaper,” Mr Baird said.
Quipping that this tech timeline gives a sense of how old he is, he said it also shows how far the world has moved in a very short time.
But the crux of Mr Baird’s presentation came from his apparent push to sell NSW as a state with a strong economy, encouraging international business delegates to invest in the state because of its resilience in times of global economic peril.
Mr Baird said NSW has been a significant contributor to the economy, it’s about a third of the population, and it remains the key driver.
He gave a break-down of the NSW economy, noting strongly that the state has the 12th largest in world and the largest in Australia, with 24 years of uninterrupted growth.
“The economy here in NSW is about $513 billion, and it has a AAA credit rating,” Mr Baird said.
He said it’s a place to invest, and expressed pride about the parameters, the growth and the trajectories “you see here in NSW”.
Being at technology conference, Mr Baird underscored the importance of the digital slice of the wider economy, noting that the digital economy in Australia is work about five per cent of $1.6 trillion.
And it’s only going to get bigger.
“You can see in terms of the digital economy the massive change we’re going to see not just here in Australia, but across the world as the digital economy starts to take over,” Mr Baird said.
He gave projections that by 2040, close to 22 per cent, a “quarter of the economy” is going to be positioned in terms of the digital.
A core element of Mr Baird’s presentation was to spruik not only NSW as an innovative state in the economy and technology development, but also Sydney itself as a “start-up city”.
“We are coming together to ensure that this city is known, and not just in words as the start-up city, but in fact in action,” Mr Baird said.
