Deborah O'Neill (Robertson, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

Bennelong sounds like a very miserable place to be. I have a whole different story to tell. It is almost like it is another country when you head north up the F3 and you get to the seat of Robertson, where innovation and job creation are on target and we are obviously responding very much to the capacity of our NBN to change things.

Recently, in the week beginning Monday 20 May, we celebrated a week of teleworking. Teleworking really is about enabling people who live on the Central Coast and travel through the region to use a smart hub facility on the coast. These smart working spaces were created by Wyong Race Club and the Central Coast Leagues Club. I want to pay tribute to the leadership of both those institutions on the coast for providing a space in which some of our commuters, who were able to convince their employers to give them teleworking for a week, were able to spend a week of doing their work from the Central Coast Leagues Club or the Wyong Race Club.

This was a very important campaign to allow people to consider what would happen if they were actually able to get off the train or the F3 for four hours a day—because a trip to Sydney and back is two hours each way. This wonderful week was made possible by the leadership of the team at the Regional Development Australia Central Coast. I pay tribute to them, a great team of people who are really driving innovation and improved life outcomes for people on the coast. I am delighted to say I was able to provide some support in terms of funding for this event as well.

We have 45,000 Central Coast commuters leaving the region each day and a telework hub is a very different alternative to just being able to work at home, especially on the back of having the NBN rolled out, turned on and about to go live in Gosford. The Central Coast Leagues Club, as a result of the success of this day, are thinking about whether this could be another way they could diversify their business and be able to provide parking for commuters who would come in from the Central Coast itself, with a shorter drive of 20 or 30 minutes perhaps, and be able to go to a dedicated work space where they could plug in and do their work.

We hoped to gain some insights from this experiment and we certainly did that. I am pleased to say that the University of Newcastle has a research team gathering data from this event and analysing it as it moves forward. I would like to acknowledge also the participation and leadership shown with regard to innovation on the coast by Gosford Council and particularly the leadership of the new general manager Paul Anderson, Colleen Worthy Jennings and our mayor, Laurie McKinna, who are very supportive of these sorts of events.

In the time that remains I would like to put on the record that a number of people had a very significant role in enabling this. Anthony Penny was an assistant who made sure everything worked on the occasion. He made sure all of the things connected so that people could get on and do their job. There was Jake Uren. Samantha Babcock from Innov8Central looked at how organising teams and innovation through this sort of model might be possible. Eddie Bernard, who is the business development manager with New South Wales Trade and Investment, was very active in this space. Kevin Bryan really was the poster boy for this event. He works with TAFE—and this was a significant part of TAFE's contribution—providing his skills and his time to help manage the event and get all of the information out into our communities so that we were able to get a broad range of people to participate in the telecommuting. Helen Polkinghorne is doing a wonderful job looking at how we can enhance learning and life experiences for people on the coast, particularly in this area. Brooke Simmons looked after the media communications and Greg Combes worked on social inclusion elements of the project. Mark Wigley was the project development manager from Regional Development Australia. He really helped us with raising the profile more broadly. There was great leadership by Graham Baker who is the innovations regions facilitator of Enterprise Connect and I do not think anybody in our electorate has worked harder on developing this vision of the coast. The teleworking project is one of 10 cluster groups that have been identified with the innovation plan for the Central Coast. Obviously with our 45,000 commuters the capacity to telework, improve productivity, and improve life work balance, the system was well tested and proved to be a great asset.

See this speech in context