A refuge in a refuge: Using our resilience to build Hobart’s economy

Tasmania has just been given a piece of strategic intelligence that should interest far more than survivalists.

A new review in the journal Global Challenges examined which parts of the world are most resilient to major global catastrophic risks. Australia emerged as the country with resilience across the widest range of scenarios, and Tasmania was described as potentially a “refuge in a refuge” - an island within an island continent, with substantial food production and a temperate climate.

This should become our economic strategy.

The world is producing a new class of highly mobile business owner: founders, investors and professionals whose companies are global but whose headquarters no longer need to be in London, Singapore, Sydney or San Francisco. They can choose where their families live, and then operate internationally from there.

For those people, the calculation is changing. Long-term climate resilience, food and water security, political stability, clean air, space and community increasingly sit alongside skills and connectivity when deciding where to base a life and a business.

Hobart is an unusually strong proposition.

Add our food and wine, natural environment, cultural life and human-scale capital city, and Hobart can offer something increasingly scarce: a sophisticated place to live without many of the pressures of the great global cities. But we should not simply wait for people to discover us.

We should identify and pursue globally portable businesses that strengthen the economy we want.

That means software, cybersecurity, artificial intelligence, data analytics and digital services.

It means specialist engineering, scientific instrumentation, robotics, autonomous systems, marine and Antarctic technology, environmental monitoring and aquaculture technology.

It means computer-gaming, animation, visual effects, digital design and other creative technology. And it means internationally focused professional firms in architecture, finance, accounting, research and specialist consulting.

These are industries built around knowledge, intellectual property and skilled people rather than proximity to a mass market. Their exports can leave Tasmania electronically.

And we are not starting from zero. Tasmania already has a technology sector worth more than $1.1 billion, with businesses exporting internationally and capabilities spanning AI, software, cyber security and data, alongside established strengths in marine, advanced technology and creative industries.

What is missing is a deliberate acquisition strategy.

Hobart can work with the State Government, industry and research institutions to identify the founders and firms we want, approach them directly and make relocation commercially simple.

A targeted proposition to businesses that can operate globally, employ locally will add capability Tasmania does not yet have. The measure of success should not be population growth but productive value: higher-skilled jobs, export income, intellectual property, business ownership and deeper industry clusters.

And this matters most for the generation coming behind us.

Tasmania has become too accustomed to educating talented young people and then watching them leave because the serious career path sits elsewhere.

We lose the engineer, programmer, scientist, designer or finance graduate, then later recruit from interstate or overseas to fill the shortage we helped create.

That is backwards.

If we attract the right global businesses here, we create the career ladder here. Our young people gain access not merely to jobs, but to industries, mentors, networks and companies capable of taking them into the world without requiring them to leave Tasmania to find it.

The recent resilience research gives Tasmania an extraordinary opening.

People with choices may increasingly seek places insulated from some of the world’s greatest pressures.

If they are going to move anyway, our ambition should be clear:

Come to Tasmania for the climate change resilience, the food, the environment and the life. But bring the business with you.