Senator TIERNEY (9:57 PM) —I rise tonight to speak on the success of technology parks and my belief in the concept of regional universities as drivers of employment. The University of Newcastle, in my own home town of Newcastle, is the second biggest employer in the Hunter and is involved in various projects that have demonstrated tremendous success in innovation and employment in new industries. The employment benefit of having a university in your region is enormous. Something that needs further development in Australia's universities is the concept of technology parks. This is particularly so for universities based in regional areas. As a driver of employment, universities have a distinct advantage in being able to provide expert advice to locally based industries. This forms one of the main features of the technology parks.

I recently saw the success of technology parks at the National Technology Park at the University of Limerick. Coming back to Ireland after 12 years, I witnessed an economic miracle in this remote region of the European Union. When I was on university sabbatical there in 1987, I was told that anyone with any get-up-and-go had got up and left. Like Scotland, Ireland is still classified as a disadvantaged region in the European Union and receives, in a similar way, additional funding for specific projects. That is just a bonus in addition to the very rapidly expanding tax revenues driven by the booming Irish economy. Over the last 10 years, the population drain from regional areas has reversed. People are moving back to Ireland and back out into regional Ireland. They are moving into high technology industries, for example computing and pharmaceuticals. A lot of the success is due to a long-term program of attracting foreign investment to Ireland, which started in the early 1980s.

The Irish government facilitated this by creating an arms-length statutory authority, the Industry Development Agency. This agency has very wide discretionary authority to offer incentives to overseas companies to a very high value before having to go to cabinet for approval. The IDA encourages foreign companies to employ local skilled workers and graduates, which exposes them to advanced technologies. Links were forged with universities and increasingly higher levels of R&D have been undertaken in Ireland; sharing in this more and more are the Irish workers.

To attract and assist foreign investment, the IDA coordinates with governments, universities, economic development organisations and the community to address the need for land, transport, infrastructure, skills decentralisation to rural regions and other issues affecting investment decisions. Underpinning the incentives is the Irish economy's trump card: very low company tax rates which, even now, are at a world leading 15 per cent. Initial efforts during the 1980s to attract foreign investment, however, met with very little success. High profile IT companies like IBM were, by that stage, very well established, with plants in a number of European countries. The Irish Department of Enterprise, Trade and Employment then cast a net for new high-flyers with rapid growth potential. In the early days—and remember we are talking about 20 years ago—they managed to attract very promising companies starting in the field, such as Apple, Microsoft and Digital, among others. In the pharmaceuticals area companies like Pfizer, which now has its worldwide manufacturing operations for Viagra in southern Ireland, were attracted. Most of the manufacturing and IT companies were initially attracted to Dublin, a city with a population of 1½ million, which is now bursting at the seams. Increasingly, newer economic development and the more recent companies coming to Ireland are moving into rural and regional areas.

Many IT and manufacturing industries were initially attracted by the very large pool of graduates from Ireland's excellent schools, universities and further education institutions. The universities are very well located across the regions of Ireland. In the late 1970s, a completely new type of university was created in the city of Limerick, on the west coast of Ireland. Formerly an institute of technology, it was upgraded to university status and hired as its professors many former heads of R&D divisions in manufacturing and IT companies. The resulting synergy created between the university and industry found expression in the creation of a high-technology industry park in Limerick. Over the last 20 years, quite a number of the high-technology companies have located in the park, creating a symbiotic relationship between themselves and the university.

Established in 1984, the National Technology Park at Limerick has become home to a growing and influential network of over 90 technology companies, employing some 5,000 people in the precincts of the university. Information technology, including e-business, is the dominant sector in Ireland's first digitally networked science and technology park. Another factor behind its success is that businesses that set up in the park have the latest technology at their fingertips. A fibre optic network loop has been installed that offers a very wide range of broadband services from this regionally based university to the national economy and through to the international economy.

This sets the scene for a clustering of technology based companies in a remote rural and regional area. Both have benefited from this partnership, with expert advice given to local companies and the latest research, design, training and graduate courses meeting the needs of industry. One of the most exciting aspects of the park is its innovation centre. This building is a fast incubator for many start-up IT companies where the research generated from the university is formed into information technology products. For example, two students designed a highly advanced company financial reporting system which was taken up by a number of the Fortune 500 companies in the United States. After six years, the two graduates floated their company and then sold it for $60 million.

The expansion of the university and technology park has helped the Shannon Region on the remote west coast of Ireland to reinvent itself as a showcase information-age city in regional Ireland. The university is an excellent model for Australian universities that may wish to build a more effective link with commerce and industry, particularly in regional areas. The aim of such a technology park is to create the appropriate physical, administrative and technological environment and to aid the growth of technology and knowledge based enterprises. The technology park provides a world-class business environment networked to a modern university. When the two combine in the one location, the benefits to the local community are widespread. While the idea of technology parks and clustering of industry has begun in Australia—for example, at the University of Ballarat in Victoria—other regions need to move to adopt this concept. We must drive this new type of development further in the regional areas of Australia to ensure, during the information age, that we reduce not increase the rural-urban divide and that regional economies can thrive in this new age.