3rd Australian Regional Economies Conference – Port Macquarie

‘Growth from within’: policies & practices to nurture existing entrepreneurs 3-4 May 2007

Trevor Sargeant from Port Macquarie-Hastings (NSW) specialist Economic Development Staff has emailed us about this conference. He believes it will be a very significant event in regional development terms as it will be focussed on existing business development and getting ‘sluggish regional Australia moving’.

How DO we grow local businesses and solve the Economic Development Riddle….Building Economies from Within?

Trevor says that for the past decades, this hard and slippery economic need has been neglected in favour of softer targets such as recruiting, colourful brochures and perhaps even too much analysis and planning.

The conference will feature inspirational keynotes from industry experts including Dr John Keniry AM and DR Phil Burgess (Director, Telstra), Marie Persson (Deputy Director-General, TAFE and Community Education, NSW Dept Education and Training), and Nicholas Saunders MD (Vice Chancellor and President, University of Newcastle).

The objectives of this conference are:

• To reinstate business development as a core plank in regional development;
• To showcase initiatives in economic gardening in Australia and in the US;
• To assess the potential role of economic gardening in the context of trends in non-metropolitan regional economies;
• To identify the types of business services that are required for regional businesses that are not readily available;
• To explore approaches to economic gardening that meet the needs of businesses effectively, and;
• To discover ways to use economic gardening as a catalyst for creating economic activity in your area.

You can listen to an overview of the conference by Peter Sargeant of Men’s Sheds here and visit the conference website here.