ASWEC 2008 Perth Bid

Perth, Western Australia is a wonderful place to live and has so much to offer but sometimes the laid-back attitude starts to grate a little. Here, over east and abroad there is a tendency to overplay the small town card. So remote and so far from wherever the speaker thinks is somwehere important. The failures are accepted and the successes downplayed. A corollary of the tall-poppy syndrome, perhaps: We had better not stand up tall in case someone knocks off my flower petals. Bond winning the Americas Cup in 1984. The inglorious fall of WA Inc. at the end of the decade. In many ways, think of the positive economic and intellectual exuberance Austin, Texas and you won't be too far wide of the mark.

I have never abided by such talk (not for long, anyway) and negativity. Perth is the Australian and even the world leader in several areas of software and technology. Not to mention being the epicentre of the current mining boom. The economic opportunity that will guarantee prosperity for a generation. Supported by rapid growth in India and China it is assured that WA will continue to earn premium prices for iron ore and liquified natural gas, among other resources, being exported in staggering quantities by BHP, Rio Tinto, Woodside and attracting newcomers from mainland China into iron ore, much as Japan a generation ago, witness Mitsui as a major investor, in addition to recent homegrown startups like Fortesque.

Perth houses centres of excellence in oil and gas for Woodside and major shareholder Shell, is a centre for expertise in mining software with companies like Maptek, and mining simulation with Immersive Technologies. Clough Engineering is respected in engineering throughout the region along with a raft of other service companies. In this sector, software and IT pays second fiddle in a supporting role and as an economic multiplier and enabling technology for mining, oil and gas, resources, processing, logistics.

Less well known and hardly ackowledged is that for a significant while Perth housed the companies that built two (or three?) of the four major banks online web sites and provided their initial forays into internet stockbroking. JDV, formerly part of Hartley Poynton stockbrokers and now part of IWL, Sanford Securities an impressive startup, now also in the IWL stable, our largest funds manager Asgard, formerly Sealcorp and now part of the fifth banking pillar, St Georges Bank, along with homegrown technology for the Perth-based headoffice of BankWest, part of Bank of Scotland, and the brilliant CCK Treasury, the mixed treasure ERG, Perpetual Trustees and others on St Georges Terrace or Colin Street. Such a wealth of software riches from these companies puts paid to the notion that Perth is behind in respect of development. Quite the contrary, it appears that Perth is an Australian and world leader in several of these areas. If you are not convinced, do a little research of your own because I have other areas to discuss besides resources and finance.

Defence, ship building, telecommunications, physics, medicine, other science and engineering disciplines abound in Perth. As an exercise, you can read about the Nobel prize in medicine awarded to University of Western Australia researchers Barry Marshall and Robyn Warren for their work discovering Helicobacter Pylori. You can read about Austal Ships and their world leading trimaran ferries at over 100m length; partnership with General Dynamics for the USA next generation littoral combat ship. Raytheon and Thales, formerly ADI-Transfield, have offices here and among local companies L-3 Nautronix, until recently the last, remaining listed company standing from the second-board of the 1980s, privatised and then sold to defence conglomerate L-3; should lead to greater exposure to world markets for its amazing, unique and world-leading technologies in underwater communications and acoustic ranging.

The high probability of the square kilometre array, the world's largest radio telescope, and its associated supercomputing facility, being built in Western Australia. Gravitational wave observatory at Gingin, low phase noise sapphire clock (i.e. accurate over short time intervals), leading audio and acoustic technologies, control systems, electronics, airport weather stations, wireless communications at the Advanced Telecommunications Research Institute, QPSX founded by the same leaders who invented the wide-area bus and protocols used worldwide in TCP/IP and ATM networks. World-class talent, innovation and leadership in science, engineering and business.

It is time that an international IEEE conference in software engineering came to Perth. The Australian Software Engineering Conference is a joint conference of Engineers Australia and the Australian Computer Society that publishes IEEE proceedings and attracts a significant international participation as a consequence. I am passionate that ASWEC should come to Perth after spending the past twenty years in the east and I am working diligently to make this opportunity a reality. Perth and surrounds has so much to offer conference attendees in return.