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House of Assembly - Fifty-Fourth Parliament, Second Session (54-2)
2021-09-09 Daily Xml
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High-Tech Sector

Mr McBRIDE (MacKillop) (14:54): My question is to the Minister for Trade and Investment. Can the minister please update the house on how the Marshall Liberal government is attracting investment and creating jobs in the space and high-tech sectors?

The Hon. S.J.R. PATTERSON (Morphett—Minister for Trade and Investment) (14:54): I thank the member for MacKillop, and no doubt he was very pleased this morning to hear the news that Microsoft, one of the biggest companies in the world, announced that it is expanding its presence to set up its Azure Space team in South Australia. More importantly, they will also be partnering with Nokia to base this work around the Lot Fourteen precinct to really power forward our space industry here.

It is a groundbreaking partnership brought together by the Marshall government. It is really fantastic news. We've got Microsoft, which is a global tech titan, and its Azure Space team is leading edge in terms of its cloud computing capability. That is partnered with Nokia, which of course is a massive company specialising now in 5G telecommunications, which really is the way forward in terms of telcos and where it is going.

This collaboration will combine its complementary strengths. From Microsoft's perspective, they've got the space technology and satellite communications. Nokia has not only the 5G telecommunications but also the ecosystem in South Australia with AI because all this space communication means massive amounts of data. Of course 5G, with its big bandwidth and then being able to analyse and compute it requires the AI, which of course South Australia has great expertise in.

Just to put this in perspective, the space industry itself is worth about $450 billion at the moment and is projected to grow to over $1 trillion by 2040. At the same time, 5G is estimated to add around $8 trillion to global GDP by 2030. These are two massive industries by themselves, but when you combine their power it is going to be really exciting.

Having Microsoft and Nokia to innovate in South Australia is really going to help them address some really tough technology challenges that we have. Australia is quite remote. It is not like many other places in the world where a lot of the land mass doesn't have terrestrial communications and so relies upon satellite communications. These technologies will use space to help and improve our life on earth in sectors such as agriculture, mining, defence and transport, and that means many thousands of companies in those sectors can take advantage of that and grow, which of course means jobs in South Australia.

Importantly, it means export solutions can then go not only to other parts of Australia but certainly to other like jurisdictions in the world in areas such as autonomous rail, mining and autonomous defence. I just quote from Microsoft's space lead in Australia, Lynn McDonald:

[This] will allows Australian organisations in multiple sectors to take a giant leap forward into a new era of communications and cloud commuting, making the most of space data and technology and also catapulting them to the very forefront of digital innovation.

This is great news. Now we've got all three of the world's biggest cloud computer companies: Google Cloud, Amazon (or AWS) and now Microsoft. We have brought them here. It is getting the fundamentals right. It is growing out the ecosystem here in South Australia to create not only the nation's space capital but also a real magnet for high-tech, and that is going to grow jobs for South Australians and then expand and help our business to grow as well.

Thank you to Microsoft and Nokia for their interest in South Australia. Congratulations to the Marshall government on bringing this together to help create jobs for South Australians.

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