Extract: South China Morning Post

9 Oct. 1993

[T]he establishment in 1986 of a Trade Development Zone (TDZ) on 200 hectares of scrubland across the bay from Darwin's city centre … create[d] a hub for trade with Asia.

…

''We have the gateway - now the Federal Government has discovered it,'' he says. ''There is a whole different psyche here and we bring a different dimension to Asia and trade with Asia. We are more central than Singapore.'' He says Australia must embrace Asia but the region must take this largest regional economy after Japan and China seriously too: ''We have worked on the basis of a two-way street.'' Mr Stone says the NT's success goes wider than trade: ''It has been built on education, cultural and sporting ties. I won't pretend we had this great strategy - It just turned out that way.'' Sakib Awan, a Pakistani-born former hotel sales manager, now the NT's 1992 New Exporter of the Year, didn't have a strategy either when he read about dried seafood in a Singaporean magazine.

Now his company exports dried shark's fin, sea cucumber, scallops and prawns to Hong Kong and Singapore and has built a A$1 million turnover in two years.

''I am so close to my markets, four hours to Singapore, another three to Hong Kong, that I am going to make all my dreams come true in Darwin, Northern Territory, or as people are now preferring us to say, Australia's Northern Territory's,'' he says.