Queensland Premier Peter Beattie is on intimate terms with persistence. Just ask Richard Branson.
Branson recently announced that he was shopping for an Australian headquarters site. But the Virgin Atlantic chairman already had a location short list that was truly short: It included only Sydney and Melbourne, Australia’s two largest, best known cities.
Faced with such site selection rejection, many officials might slump into pique or self-pity.
Not Beattie.
“I hadn’t yet met Richard Branson,” he recalls. “But when we heard he was coming to Australia and not even visiting, I rang him and urged him to include Queensland in his deliberations.”
That bold persistence paid off. Beattie got his meeting – and much more. Swayed by Queensland’s ceaseless courting, Virgin Australia rerouted its location plan, landing its headquarters in Brisbane, Queensland’s capital city, where the airline is also siting a 150-employee call center, and a maintenance base and operations center. All told, Virgin is creating 750 new jobs in the nation’s third-largest city.
Explains Virgin Australia CEO Brett Godfrey, “The government went out of its way to facilitate our arrangements with all parties involved. While several states offered us attractive packages, the Queensland government went a step further in actively assisting us with requirements like airport access and finding office accommodation.”
Says Beattie, “We convinced Virgin that we are a can-do state in which everyone is going in the same direction.”
Consolidating ED Efforts
Landing Virgin typifies Beattie’s can-do persistence in creating new jobs in Australia’s largest state (2.5 times bigger than Texas, in fact). In 1999, Queensland’s 45,500 new jobs were half of Australia’s entire total.
Much of that success has rested in translating persistence into policy. For example, soon after becoming Queensland’s premier in 1998, the 47-year-old created the Queensland Dept. of State Development (www.statedevelopment.qld.gov.au) as a one-stop rapid-response mechanism.
“Previously, our economic development activities were scattered over five different governmental branches,” Beattie explains. “The Virgin headquarters was exactly the sort of operation for which Dept. of State Development was created.”
‘Grunts’ Garner Glory
Beattie is still pushing, speaking midway through a whirlwind 10-day U.S. mission.
“It’s been quite a successful tour thus far for the grunt team — which is what Ross Rolfe (Dept. of State Development director-general) and I affectionately call ourselves,” he chuckles during a brief break at the BIO2000 Exhibition in Boston.
Some grunts. Already, the two’s Silicon Valley stopover finalized two major high-tech projects that will locate in Brisbane: hot open-source software player Red Hat’s Asia-Pacific headquarters and Oracle’s new software development center.
“Those projects are part of our smart state strategy to develop a critical mass in knowledge-based industries that add future value,” Beattie explains. “And they capitalize on our position on the doorstep to Asia, the world’s biggest market.”
Accompanied by 50 members of Queensland’s biotech industry, Beattie’s presence at Boston’s BIO2000 signals another industry that’s getting a persistent push. The premier has initiated a 10-year plan for nurturing Queensland’s biotech sector, aiming to capitalize on the natural resources that were once the area’s economic linchpin.
Later, Beattie will bounce to Washington, D.C., finalizing a five-year collaborative pact with the Smithsonian Institution, including that eminent entity’s involvement in building an “interactive education building” in Brisbane.
And part of Beattie’s economic development model, he says, has stateside roots: “The government is very much hands-on in terms of investment. But we see our role a bit like the incubator model that we saw in Austin, Texas, a little while ago — a partnership between universities and the private sector, with the government acting as a catalyst.”
The final visit of the breakneck U.S. trek, to Queensland’s sister state of South Carolina, might seem merely ceremonial — the two states are exchanging a koala and a palmetto tree. But bet on more knowledge-gathering by Beattie, a voracious reader who’s also found time to write two books.
Says the persistent premier, “They’ve got a very sound business culture there that we admire.”
