Melbourne has won the right to host the four-yearly World Engineers Convention in 2019, esteemed by many as the ‘Olympics’ of the global engineering industry.
The announcement of the event was made by the General Assembly of the World Federation of Engineering Organizations at the World Engineering Summit in Singapore.
The 18-month Australian campaign triumphed in a secret ballot in September over a bid from the Dubai-based UAE Society of Engineers, which offered inducements to vote, Engineers Australia President Marlene Kanga said.
They threw a lot of money at the bid and made a lot of offers to pay for delegates to attend and so forth,” she said in an interview with Business Review Weekly.
Kanga went on to emphasise that Engineers Australia took a different tact, focusing instead on the increasing role of international collaboration between members of the profession in future.
“We represent the engineering profession. We set the standards of education for engineers and professional development. Engineering professionals are increasingly working internationally. We see much of our future being tied up internationally.”
Australia submitted its bid to host the event to the executive council, the World Federation of Engineering Organizations, in September 2012, a year earlier than the conventional six-year advance time frame for nations to launch their campaigns.
At that point in time, Australia was the sole bidder for the 2019 event, which is also when Engineers Australia will be celebrating its centenary.
UAE’s national engineering body subsequently submitted a bid for the event in April, despite Australia’s request for it to refrain from doing so.
In addition to the immediate economic benefits provided by the event, which is estimated at around $2,000 per delegate, Kanga says that hosting the convention will provide a sterling opportunity for the Australian engineering sector to promote itself internationally.
“We’ll be doing site visits, not for traditional engineering – civil and infrastructure – but the new engineering which abounds around Melbourne and in places like Geelong,” she said.
“These are things like advanced manufacturing, additive manufacturing and nano-technology. We’ll have site visits to these facilities to show you where engineering is going, which many in the world may not know about.”
The four-yearly convention is considered the world’s peak general assembly of representatives from 90 national engineering associations, and attracts between 4,000 and 5,000 delegates.
