actconference.com.au  actconference.com.au

22-23 August 2023
Hyatt Hotel
Canberra
Australian Capital Territory

Conference Agenda

Day 1 - 22nd August 2023

08:00 - 08:50

REGISTRATION

08:50 - 09:00

MC OPENS

09:00 - 09:30

Speed Networking
This speed networking session will allow delegates to introduce themselves and swap business cards with other conference attendees.

09:30 - 10:00

Address by the Chief Engineer

  • Delivering the Infrastructure for Canberra’s Future

Adrian Piani, ACT Chief Engineer, ACT Government

Adrian Piani

10:00 - 10:30

Keynote Address from the City Renewal Authority

  • Revitalising Central Canberra
  • Influencing Design-led People Focused Sustainable Development

Malcolm Snow, Chief Executive Officer, City Renewal Authority

Malcolm Snow

10:30 - 11:00

Placemaking and Integrated Design for Manufacture and Assembly (DfMA)
 
This presentation investigates how design for place can integrate with advanced methods of Design for Manufacture and Assembly (DfMA), while enhancing a city’s identity and character and addressing future challenges.

Transport infrastructure projects are often at a corridor scale and include stations and public spaces, bridges and viaducts, active transport links, stabling facilities, substations, dives and ancillary buildings, systems and signalling and the corridor itself. The impact of these projects upon a city is significant and long lasting. Designing for place and placemaking is rising in prominence within transit project dialogue and debate and designers need to respond to these challenges.

DfMA is often focused upon building method, and engineering with limited reference to impact upon the built environment.  When DfMA is understood and benefits appreciated, DfMA principles can be incorporated to enhance a transport corridor’s identity, connection with place and enhance placemaking.

Kevin will refer to how specific design responses to place, and a city’s distinct identity, are coordinated with DFMA principles to deliver flexible,
enduring, and relevant design. He has played a leading role in the design of the following metro and light rail projects providing evidence to demonstrate these themes:
• Canberra Light Rail, Stages 1 and 2
• Melbourne Tram Network, Next Generation
 Gold Coast Light Rail, Stages 1-3
• Epping to Chatswood Rail Link, Sydney Metro Northwest
• Bilbao Metro, Line 1

Kevin Carrucan, Principal, Architectus

Kevin Carrucan

11:00 - 11:30

TEA BREAK

11:30 - 12:00

Commonwealth Avenue Bridge Renewal Project

  • As one of two major crossings over the Lake, the Commonwealth Avenue Bridge is one of the busiest transport hubs in Canberra.
  • The proposed improvements to the Bridge are essential to extend its life and to meet the current and future transport needs of our National Capital.
  • Project Overview and Updates  

Greg Tallentire, Project Director, National Capital Authority

Greg Tallentire

12:00 - 12:30

Keynote Presentation from Suburban Land Agency

  • Delivering People-focused Neighbourhoods across the ACT
  • Creating Great Places through Greenfield Development and Urban Renewal

John Dietz, Chief Executive Officer, Suburban Land Agency, ACT Government

John Dietz

12:30 - 13:00

Measuring Urban Health

Putting the urban health and wellbeing at the centre of major projects and infrastructure investment is now widely understood as being critical to maintaining the physical and mental health of both the current and future Canberra community. But how do we measure what good health and wellbeing means for the whole of that community? What indicators, methods and tools can be applied,  and how can these work at both the Territory and individual project scale? We will look to our work within both the UN-Habitat Global Public Space Programme and here in the ACT to provide a framework for understanding this crucial goal.

 

Obelia Tait, Director, Inhabit Place

Obelia Tait

13:00 - 14:00

LUNCH BREAK

14:00 - 14:20

Introducing Bluebeam and it’s use across the project lifecycle

  • Digitise your plan reviews, approvals faster and more accurately - Speed up all your processes with software for civil engineering, land planning and public development project collaboration. Studio in Bluebeam Revu allows you to securely review, mark up, and modify plans and permits at the same time. Effortlessly edit drawings and documents with industry-standard markups and symbols, then save or share custom civil toolsets so clients and project partners are always on the same page.
  • Quantify your estimations faster - Help your preconstruction teams quantify estimations faster by using visual search in Revu. Effortlessly count assets, create legend lists and take linear or area measurements. Take quick, precise measurements and dynamically link totals from multiple PDFs to Excel as you draw, ensuring faster, more accurate estimates for sitework items.
  • Get actionable data insights and manage your assets in one placeAutomatically track all markups placed on a PDF, including author, date, color, plus associated comments and statuses. And export data to your preferred BI tool to get valuable insights into project progress and performance. Maintain your communities’ assets and keep everyone on track by using the data in your plans to seamlessly search and quantify how many assets you have.

Ben Byrnes, Professional Services Lead for Structural Engineering, VinZero A2K Technologies

Ben Byrnes

14:20 - 14:40

Canberra’s Housing Growth Roadmap

Housing affordability has become perhaps the single biggest problem that Canberra faces. Over the past 20 years, both house prices and rents have been growing at a faster pace than average income levels. This threatens the ideal of a fair go for all and drags on economic productivity as workers struggle to find suitable housing in locations close to employment and services. This 20-minute presentation would:

  • Paint the picture of Australia’s tight housing market compared to other OECD countries
  • Provide an overview of the indicators of housing supply and demand in Canberra
  • Establish the capacity for housing growth under current planning controls
  • Discuss opportunities to unlock additional housing supply

Mehra Jafari, Director, Policy and Analytics, Mecone

Mehra Jafari

14:40 - 15:00

Road Safety and Safer Road Infrastructure Priorities

The ACT is engaged in a number of significant projects. Some of these are obvious: future stages of the light rail, War Memorial extensions, new hospitals and stadia. Others, such as electric vehicle charging and active travel infrastructure, and micro-mobility systems, are less widely discussed possibly because they are dispersed through the community and delivered with less public sector involvement. Each major project has an impact on road safety. Safety impacts of major projects, and measures to enhance safety in delivering projects, are discussed. This is in the context of our shared vision for zero road fatalities and serious injuries. 

Dr Rod Katz, Chair - ACT, Australasian College of Road Safety

Dr Rod Katz

15:00 - 15:30

TEA BREAK

15:30 - 16:00

Time | Cost | Quality | Carbon | Community – the ‘how’ of delivering resilient infrastructure for the ACT

City Infrastructure needs to sit in the built environment in a way that serves humanity. It needs to be visionary, cognisant of a resilient future, consider the whole of a society from the marginalised to the entrenched, whilst also being commercially responsible. In this presentation I will explore how to take the right steps at the right time to transform ambition, policies and plans into sustainable and resilient built outcomes. We will explore the time-old triangle of time | cost | quality and extend this to a circle that includes carbon | community. The ACT Govt has outlined the vision and the ambition for the Territory. The latest Budget and Infrastructure Plan/s have given clarity to ‘the what’.  Next is ‘the how’.

Dr Therese Flapper, General Manager - Canberra Region, TSA, Immediate Past President Engineers Australia Canberra

Dr Therese Flapper

16:00 - 16:30

Gender Sensitive Urban Design Toolkit

  • ACT Government has recently released the Gender Sensitive Urban Design Framework and Implementation Toolkit (GSUD). This initiative is a profoundly positive step forward in setting the highest benchmarks for public spaces in Canberra; ones that are equitable, inclusive, accessible, and safe for everyone, in particular women, girls, gender diverse and other vulnerable people.
  • The development of GSUD was jointly sponsored by Transport Canberra City Services (TCCS), Major Project, City Renewal Authority and Suburban Land Agency. It relates specifically to Objective 3: Building a community where women and girls are safe and supported to participate of ACT Women’s Plan 2016-26, a ten-year strategy to ensure the ACT community values and respects all women and girls, commits to gender equality and promotes and protects the rights, wellbeing and potential of all women and girls.
  • GSUD is a practical guide that examines common gender-related public realm inequalities and challenges, offering recommendations to remedy and resolve.
  • Applying a gender sensitive approach will assist not only urban design professionals, but also the ACT Government in understanding how different groups experience the public realm addressing any inequalities in the urban environment. It is aimed to help and guide urban design professionals in both private practice or government who wish to implement safe and more inclusive urban spaces.
  • Richmond Henty, a Senior Project Manager in the Urban Team of Infrastructure Delivery in TCCS and Anna Chauvel, lead consultant from PLACE Laboratory will explain GSUD and the benefits of adopting a gender sensitive urban design approach.

Anna Chauvel, Co- Founder and Director, Place Laboratory
Richmond Henty, Senior Project Manager, Urban Team, Infrastructure Delivery, Transport Canberra and City Services

Anna Chauvel
Richmond Henty

16:30 - 16:35

MC CLOSES

16:35 - 17:35

NETWORKING & DRINKS FUNCTION

Day 2 - 23rd August 2023

08:50 - 09:20

REGISTRATION

09:20 - 09:30

MC OPENS

09:30 - 10:00

Speed Networking
This speed networking session will allow delegates to introduce themselves and swap business cards with other conference attendees.

10:00 - 10:15

Embodied Carbon in Construction
  • Embodied Carbon is the next frontier for reducing carbon emissions in the built environment. Over the past decade we have seen ambitious improvements in our operating energy emissions. As that continues to reduce, embodied carbon will become the dominant source of building emissions.
  • This topic is about why the ACT Industry needs to care about it, what it is and how to incorporate embodied carbon reduction into your projects

Maddison Fisher, Materials and Carbon Specialist, Footprint Company, TSA

Maddison Fisher

10:15 - 11:00

Molonglo River Bridge Crossing - Joint Presentation from the ACT Goverment and Delivery Partners BMD and pitt&sherry
  • The ACT Government is planning roads and infrastructure upgrades to improve access in and around the Molonglo Valley and to keep our city moving as Canberra grows. The completion of John Gorton Drive, including the Molonglo River bridge, will support significant land releases in Molonglo, including the full development of Denman Prospect, Whitlam and the Molonglo Group Centre.
  • Project Overview and Updates

Irene Scott, General Manager Bridges and Structural Engineering, pitt&sherry
Michael McGrath, Senior Director – John Gorton Drive and Molonglo River Bridge Project, Transport Canberra and City Services
Steven Glover, Engineering Manager - Southern Region, BMD Constructions

Irene Scott
Michael McGrath
Steven Glover

11:00 - 11:30

TEA BREAK

11:30 - 12:00

Tackling Housing Affordability: The Architect's Role

While architects may not have direct control over macro-level factors that influence housing affordability, they can play a crucial role in advocating for certain measures and implementing strategies that contribute to addressing the issue of housing affordability.

Often it is not only about housing affordability.  The challenge is often about densification and providing the missing middle for a new community. It’s about finding inner city locations and intensifying development in a sustainable way. It’s about the speed of construction, nimbleness and the ability to deliver diversified housing at scale.

It’s about searching for innovation by looking at new housing typologies, innovative construction methodologies, and materials that can lower costs without compromising quality. 

This conversation will advocate for positive change and cover:

  • Design Efficiency
  • Cost-Effective Materials and Construction Techniques
  • Sustainable Design and Energy Efficiency
  • Adaptability and Future-Proofing
  • Advocacy and Collaboration

Gary Henighen, Associate Principal, Architectus

Gary Henighen

12:00 - 12:30

Driving Canberra's Economic Growth and Prosperity through Business

  • Leading discussion and advocating issues that impact businesses in the ACT

Greg Harford, Chief Executive Officer, Canberra Business Chamber

Greg Harford

12:30 - 13:00

Hospital Projects: Bridging the Gap between Pre-Construction and Construction

Time after time, all the important planning, risk mitigation, and option analysis done in the pre-construction phase to inform the reference design and assist the Principal in making decisions related to the project get sidestepped. More often than not this information does not make it to the Contractor because we insist on them 'informing themselves' only to incur additional costs, time blowouts, and ultimately to not meet expectations. Could we be doing things better?

Matthew Gygi, RPS Practice Lead, RPS Group

Matthew Gygi

13:00 - 14:00

LUNCH BREAK

14:00 - 14:30

Battery Storage and Grid Integration Program (BSGIP)
 
The Battery Storage and Grid Integration Program (BSGIP) is undertaking research into battery materials and the development, integration, operation and optimisation of energy storage in electricity grids and electricity markets globally.

Professor Lachlan Blackhall, Entrepreneurial Fellow and Head, Battery Storage and Grid Integration Program, Australian National University

Professor Lachlan Blackhall

14:30 - 15:10

Panel Discussion
Infrastructure Priorities: Shaping the Future of the Australian Capital Territory

  • Prioritising Infrastructure to maintain Canberra's liveability, productivity and sustainability
  • Role of the Building and Construction Sector in Driving ACT's Economic Growth
  • Role of the Property Industry in driving ACT's Economic Growth
  • Overcoming challenges facing the building and construction industry
  • Supporting the growth and development of new and established industries

Dr Therese Flapper, General Manager - Canberra Region, TSA, Immediate Past President Engineers Australia Canberra
Michael Hopkins, Chief Executive Officer, Master Builders ACT
Shane Martin, ACT and Capital Region Executive Director, Property Council of Australia

Dr Therese Flapper
Michael Hopkins
Shane Martin

15:10 - 15:30

Shaping the Future of Australia’s Construction Industry through Technology

  • Exploring BIM and AI in Construction Projects

Dr Saeed Banihashemi, Associate Professor of Building and Construction Management, University of Canberra

Dr Saeed Banihashemi

15:30 - 15:50

Ministerial Address
 

Andrew Barr MLA, Chief Minister, Treasurer, Minister for Climate Action, Minister for Economic Development, Minister for Tourism, ACT Government

Andrew Barr MLA

15:50 - 16:00

MC CLOSES

Agenda is subject to change
*Speakers to be confirmed

An Event by:

Expotrade - Empowering knowledge

Contact:

Expotrade Australia Pty Ltd
Suite 24, Building 4, 195 Wellington Road
Clayton VIC 3168 Australia
Tel: +613-95450360
Email: info@eteglobal.com