Conference Wrap-up

The 2016 IPWEAQ conference was our most successful conference to date with 333 delegates (369 at the excellence awards) from 36 councils and 52 organisations with 43 exhibitors. The theme for this year's conference was 'collaborative engineering'. The conference handbook is available to view online.

This year we introduced a few new concepts including IPWEAQ Bingo at the welcome function, the fireside chat offering centre stage to three of our emerging engineers and the great debate, ‘women make better engineers than men’ which closed the conference and through live polling declared the affirmative team the winners with 75% of the vote. Michael Pascoe did a brilliant job as moderator of the debate and noted that a woman has in fact ‘made’ all engineers, a point not picked up by either team. 

Michael was also MC for the conference program and delivered an interesting keynote presentation about our economy. He thoroughly enjoyed being involved and learnt a lot about engineers and what is special about the public works sector, in particular our sense of community. We hope to have Michael back again next year in Townsville.

Also new this year are the conference podcasts including all keynote and plenary sessions and all presentations delivered in all 12 streams plus delegate and exhibitor interviews. These will be made available to paid conference delegates in January. Those who were unable to attend the conference will be able to subscribe to the podcasts for $600 plus GST (members) and $900 plus GST (non-members). The podcasts represent 12.5 hours of CPD. 

Collaboration was also the key to success of this year’s excellence awards overall winner, the Sunshine Coast Council for the Nambour Youth Activity Precinct and RSL War Memorial. This project was chosen as the overall winner for its collaborative multidisciplinary approach in creating an innovative urban space that brings the community together. You can read more about the project in the December 2016 issue of Engineering for Public Works.

Engineer of the Year was awarded to Paul Keech, Gladstone Regional Council with Angela Fry chosen as the Woman in Engineering. See all the 2016 IPWEAQ excellence awards winners plus photos of the gala awards ceremony/dinner and the conference.

The conference was opened by Councillor Amanda Cooper, Chairman, Infrastructure Committee, Brisbane City Council on behalf of the Lord Mayor, Graham Quirk. Thank you to the Brisbane City Council, our host council for IPWEAQ 2016! And thank you once again to our many Partners, sponsors and exhibitors for contributing to the success of our conference. We look forward to doing it all again, with more new intiatives, in Townsville, 23-25 October 2016. Please mark your diary now.

Leigh Cunningham
CEO