Canberra is to put in a bid for a co-operative multi-media centre under the Federal Government’s “Creative Nation” statement. The interim chair of the ACT consortium, Neville Higgins, and the Minister for Business, Employment and Tourism, Tony De Domenico, made the announcement last week. Under Creative nation about $60 million over five years would be spent in six multi-media centres. It was likely that Sydney and Melbourne would get at least one each. Multi-media is combined graphics, sound, video and text usually on compact disc for computers, but also delivered on-line. Dr Higgins and Mr De Domenico said Canberra was ideally positioned to get one of the centres.
This was because: Canberra had a highly educated workforce and a higher percentage of it than elsewhere in information industries. Its existing multi-media industry was the largest per-capita in Australia. It had the project in Gungahlin to link 5000 homes with an interactive broadband network which could be used to pilot CD and other interactive product. Canberra had a huge proportion of Australia’s information base _ in government and national institutions. It had the resources of the National Library, the ANU, University of Canberra, CSIRO, National gallery, War Memorial and National Museum National Film and Sound Archives. It had the support of leading Australian world-wide publishers of interactive entertainment titles, such as Electronic Arts, Beam Software and others. Canberra had good education resources. Dr Higgins said the consortium included local multimedia firms, the ANU, UC the Canberra Institute of Technology, Telstra and the CSIRO.
Mr De Domenico said the bid had the support of the ACT Government which “”is committed to developing business in the ACT”. If Canberra won a centre it would get seeding money to develop a multi-media industry. Dr Higgins said that at present Canberra firms concentrated on the vertical multi-media market _ fairly high-priced product aimed at a few corporate and institutional customers, rather than the horizontal mass market of education and entertainment. For example, his company Learning Curve, produced fairly specialist industry-training CDs for geologists and cataloguers. The multi-media centre would provide an opportunity for Canberra to build a broad-based multi-media industry.