THIS year\u2019s Westpac Economic Breakfast has delivered some good news for Geelong, with the bank\u2019s chief economist Bill Evans upbeat about the region\u2019s future.<\/p>\n
The annual event organised by the Geelong Chamber of Commerce as part of the Geelong Small Business Festival draws a big crowd each year, and this time was attended by nearly 300 people in the new location of GMHBA Stadium.<\/p>\n
Mr Evans said Australia had the highest annual population growth rate in the world, Victoria\u2019s rate was higher than that, and Geelong\u2019s rate was higher still – about 2.7 per cent annually, driven mostly by housing affordability.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe Geelong story is a really great story.<\/p>\n
\u201cLast year you had an increase of about 7,000 people \u2013 more than half of that was people relocating
\nfrom within Victoria, and only about one-and-a-half thousand was migrants. In Melbourne, 60 per cent of their growth is migrants.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhen I think about your physical location just outside of Melbourne, lower house prices, fabulous transport, and Melbourne being the growth capital of Australia, you couldn\u2019t be better positioned.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe luck of where you\u2019re positioned is incredibly important and I can see it in the optimism that I see every year when I come along here.\u201d<\/p>\n
Mr Evans also spent some time talking about the financial significance of the coming federal election.<\/p>\n
\u201cBusinesses are nervous about any political risk, and what it\u2019s done in the past couple of elections is show up as a collapse in jobs growth around those elections,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
\u201cMy worry is that one of the assumptions that everybody is making is that the strong jobs growth \u2013 which is already slowing down, because it just wasn\u2019t sustained at three-and-a-half per cent \u2013 my worry is that political uncertainty is going to weigh on those jobs.\u201d<\/p>\n
He said the election would not be like previous federal polls, as Labor\u2019s policies on issues such as company tax and franking credits gave it a $180 billion \u201cwarchest\u201d over the next 10 years that the Coalition did not have and a clear point of difference.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe issue (for the Coalition) is what they\u2019re (Labor) going to do with that money.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
THIS year\u2019s Westpac Economic Breakfast has delivered some good news for Geelong, with the bank\u2019s chief economist Bill Evans upbeat about the region\u2019s future. The annual event organised by the Geelong Chamber of Commerce as part of the Geelong Small Business Festival draws a big crowd each year, and this time was attended by nearly […]<\/p>\n