Our Agenda

Our Current Policy Agenda

As an organisation focussed on development and advocacy, it follows that to be effective and relevant we need to respond to the various challenges as they present themselves. To be relevant we must maintain a focus on population growth in a sustainable fashion and governments at all levels need to participate and partner up to this objective. Only by having consistent population growth, supported by appropriate levels of infrastructure spend within appropriate policy settings, will be able compete internationally. Our focus will be to the north, east and west. We will be flexible and our agenda will change from time to time, but the emphasis on the key economic pillars around which our city and regional economies grow will remain relatively constant.

Those pillars are:

• sustainable tourism investment and growth;
• developing an educated and healthy city and region by supporting our education and health sectors for our own needs and as an export commodity/opportunity;
• developing our Airport and Seaport infrastructure capacity and competitiveness;
• developing world class agriculture, aquaculture and horticulture industries;
• developing the infrastructure and investment capacity for a growing modern service city;

It follows then that there will be a concentration of effort on ensuring that our businesses and industry remain competitive. This is essential for growing our population  and accordingly we will place an emphasis on advocating for, but not limited to, the following:

• access to suitable and competitively priced bulk water sources for urban and primary industry uses;
• growing the development and competiveness of our marine and aviation based businesses against internationally accepted benchmarks;
• increased investment in road and rail connectivity to ensure a competitive regional network able to compete within the context of national benchmarking standards;
• fair and equitable access to suitable and competitively priced energy sources for industry and domestic consumption;
• access to a fair and equitable insurance market across North East Australia;
• and access to a reliable and skilled workforce and improved access to skilled immigrants.