Think Tank: Prof Ned Pankhurst

INCREASED investment in education and innovation is needed to protect the Gold Coast from its own boom-and-bust economy.

Griffith Senior Deputy Vice Chancellor and new Titans board member Prof Ned Pankhurst for think tank column. Picture: Jerad Williams

THE tie is a giveaway that there is something fishy about Professor Ned Pankhurst. “It’s wearing my heart on my sleeve,” he said of his fish-covered neckwear — testament to his career spent studying the biology of fish. “Essentially my love of fish has taken me all over the world.”

“Fish endocrinology — fish hormones. Fish have hormonal control of activities and functions just like humans do and the principles are essentially the same.”

New Zealand-born and educated, Prof Pankhurst has lived in Australia for 20 years, nine of them here, and he has no plans to ever leave.

What do you love about the Gold Coast?

“It’s really nice living in what’s essentially a set of connected villages.

“The thing about the Gold Coast is it’s a little bit of a Tardis of a city, you don’t really start to discover what it’s lke until you’ve been inside it for awhile and it’s so much more than the presentation of the Glitter Strip and Surfers.

“That discovery is one of the nice things about coming to the Coast and living on the Coast.”

Prof Ned Pankhurst.

What do you think could be done better on the Gold Coast?

“The challenge for the city is actually growing into its size, we’re an adolescent city, in terms of the age of Australian cities, we’re sixth largest city but we’re not really behaving like that yet.

“Part of it’s the way we think about ourselves and how we’d like to see ourselves in the future.

“The key to that is having a multidimensional, sophisticated view of ourselves in terms of the range of industries, business, activities, recreations that take place in the city.

“People sometimes talk about cities growing up — it’s actually more about cities becoming more multidimensional.

“There’s no question that development and tourism are going to continue to be the backbone of the city’s economy and they’re both wonderful things — the trouble is they tend to have boom and bust periods.

“We need to even out and diversify the economy so we’ve got more robustness and sustainability.

“The key to that is around the education and innovation industries — we’re already on that track.

“People shouldn’t take for granted the fact that we have significant presence from three universities on the Coast and a large and successful TAFE sector — that’s a really major asset for any city, particularly one that’s not a capital city.”

Prof Ned Pankhurst.

In your travels, what have you seen being done elsewhere you think could work well here?

“Melbourne is a large, sophisticated city, but it also styles itself as an events capital and it dose that very successfully.

“We’ve got to focus developing tourism and events, but we’ve got to make sure we build that as part of a broader economy that includes education and innovation-based industries.

“Part of that requires the flexibility of identity to say we can be all of those things, and none of them are mutually exclusive.

“Is the Gold Coas about `famous for fun’? Absolutely, but is it about education and smart industry? Yes, it’s those things too.

“Adding the lifestyle to that, a city that we could be like is San Diego, where there’s the combination of industry investment, top-end industries, high-quality research organisations, climate and lifestyle and that becomes part of the package that you need to recruit a gen-y workforce.”

Prof Ned Pankhurst.

If money, time, laws and approvals were no issue, what is one big project you’d undertake tomorrow?

“I’d spend it on some of the things that the city’s already committed to.

“The health and knowledge precinct is an inspired project — it’s going to be one of the key legacy benefits of the Commonwealth Games but, if I had a bucket of money, I’d accelerate the development of it now.

“I’d use that money to generate matching funds from industry of the right sorts of industries that we want to cluster in the precinct and in other parts of the innovation corridor of the Coast.

“People place more value on things that they invest in and it’s all very well for us to present ourselves as a wonderful city with a great lifestyle and great commercial opportunities, all of which are true, but every major development around innovation clusters has actually involved carrots of some description.

“Sometimes these are public money, sometimes they’re private money, but you actually have to create momentum in order to bring in the establishment tenants, industries, businesses as you’re developing that cluster.

“Two of them are already here — the scale of the health investment on this Parklands precinct is not matched anywhere in Australia in terms of co-located development and it’s a fantastic launching pad for us in terms of what we can do next.

“The other thing I’d do is accelerate the creative and performing arts precinct.”

What conversations should Gold Coast movers and shakers be having?

“We now have an education ecosystem on the Gold Coast where young people can train for just about anything.

“We will be fully successful when those people can work on the Gold Coast.

“The conversation is how do we generate employment opportunities so that young people can plan to live, work and play on the Gold Coast for their lives if they choose to, irrespective of their endeavours.”