National Tech Summit Speech - Our national technology narrative

12 November 2024

Introduction

I am very pleased to have the chance to speak at the 2024 National Tech Summit.

I want to speak about the importance of our national technology narrative.

First, I want to point out that all too often the public debate about technology has a negative bias.

My second point - hardly contentious in this room I expect - is that the march of science and technology is an enormous positive for Australia.  As our local tech sector grows in scale, the benefits are profound. 

My third proposition today will be that a positive and optimistic national narrative about science and technology is important to shape public policy. 

Since being founded the Tech Council has been a strong voice, working to explain the economic and social benefits to Australia of more activity, more employment and more investment in science and technology. 

Should the Coalition win the next election you will have a government which is committed to the tech sector and which believes strongly in its importance to Australia’s productivity, prosperity and potential. 

Negative commentary about technology

Let me start then with the observation that much of the commentary about technology has a negative bias. 

There is plenty of focus on the risks of social media.  For older Australians key risks include financial scams and romance scams.

For children and teenagers, there are the dangers of being bullied online, or being taken down algorithmic pathways of despair.  Then there are the issues of too much screen time and too little time playing outside. 

For Australian girls and women in particular, so called revenge porn - image based abuse is a better term in my view - can be devastating. 

Another major area of negative commentary is the fear that that technology is going to take away our jobs. There is particular anxiety about what artificial intelligence will mean.

One specific source of hostility towards technology is the union movement - and in turn this is reflected in the agenda and rhetoric of Ministers in the Albanese Government. For example, many Australians value the flexible work opportunities offered by digital platforms like Uber, Airtasker or Doordash - but former Industrial Relations Minister Tony Burke called the gig economy ‘a cancer.’

Science and technology is an enormous positive

I do not dismiss or minimise some of the issues I have mentioned; indeed working to improve online safety has occupied a fair portion of my energies in nearly fifteen years in parliament, and of course the Coalition strong supports age verification on social media platforms so those under 16 are not exposed to the known adverse effects of social media.

But in my view the net impacts to Australia of the rise of the tech sector are highly positive. Now some in this room might regard this point as so obvious it is hardly worth making. But I would respectfully suggest that it is in the interests of both the tech sector and the nation more broadly to make what in my view are four interrelated arguments.

The first is that it is human progress in science and technology which has been critical to the prosperity and quality of life which we are fortunate to enjoy in Australia today.

Thanks to science and technology, the recent COVID pandemic killed many fewer people than it would have if it had come along one hundred years earlier. The comparison with the Spanish flu of 1919, for example, is very stark. 

Thanks to science and technology, the green revolution of the nineteen sixties hugely increased crop yields, and allowed humanity to avoid the mass starvation that many had feared would accompany rapid population growth. 

Thanks to science and technology, we have electricity and transportation and clean, reliable drinking water and high quality sanitation and instant communication and connectivity over the internet and so many other facets of modern life.  The quality of life which ordinary people in advanced nations like Australia enjoy today would simply astound even the wealthiest people from even 100 years ago – let alone 1,000 years ago. 

The second argument is that the rise of information technology and the internet, as one particular example of the march of science and technology, has been of profound economy wide benefit - and consumers have benefited greatly. 

Over the last twenty years, in sector after sector, internet based businesses have developed better, more efficient ways to meet customer needs. If you want to buy or sell a house, or a car, or look for a job or find a new employee, platforms like Domain, Realestate.com.au, Drive, carsales.com.au and Seek are a cheaper, better and quicker way to do it. 

In the economic jargon, the internet has greatly reduced search costs, it has allowed consumers in many markets to have near perfect information, and it has markedly reduced the market power of producers, to the considerable benefit of consumers.

And for consumers in a small economy like Australia, it has brought particular benefits because we can now buy goods and services online from global businesses.  To take one of many examples, thirty years ago Australian book buyers had to pay more and wait longer for a new book than those in Britain or the United States. We were the victims of a global carve up by publishers.  Today the rise of internet-based retailers has swept that away. 

The third argument is that the rise of software and of the internet has given Australian businesses new opportunities to compete globally.  If you are an Australian tech business generating good sales from Australian corporate customers, it is now a natural next step to seek out customers around the world.  The impressive growth of Safety Culture – now a $2.7 billion business – is but one example. Of course Canva and Atlassian and Afterpay and Wisetech are among the many other oft cited examples. 

Software also gives Australian businesses a new way to compete in industries like automotive.  We were not competitive making and exporting cars – big metal boxes which cost a lot to ship.  But if you are a technology business serving the global automotive market, the story can be very different. 

One good example is Adelaide based Cohda Wireless, which makes software for connected and automated vehicles – and has won contracts with global automakers like Volkswagen. 

As the Tech Council rightly points out, Australia’s tech sector includes not only standalone tech businesses; it also includes the very large technology teams in our mining companies, our banks, our retailers, and every other segment of the economy.

The capabilities some of these teams deploy puts their businesses at the very forefront of their industry globally. A good example is Australia’s expertise in remote controlled sophisticated mining operations.  If you get the chance, as I have had, to visit the Rio Tinto Control Centre at Perth airport, or the equally impressive Hub operated by Fortescue in the Perth CBD, I urge you to go and have a look.  In both centres, hundreds of people work in front of banks of screens and monitors, remotely controlling highly complex and sophisticated industrial operations 1500 kilometres away in the Pilbara.

There are also plenty of standalone tech businesses serving the sectors where Australia has world scale, including of course mining but also agriculture, financial services and education.  A big mining sector means a big mining tech sector, and it also means a steady flow of start ups bringing clever new ideas to market; on the most recent count there are 151 start ups in Australia’s mining tech sector.

One good example, now well beyond start up status, is the rapidly growing Fleet Space Technologies in Adelaide. Their clever approach using nano-satellite technology to scan for minerals underground has reduced the timeline in prospecting for minerals reserves from several years down to a matter of days.  

An earlier stage mining tech company I met last year is Wollongong based Torqn, which has developed a social media like platform for people who work on heavy construction and mining equipment from companies like Komatsu and Caterpillar.  It’s a clever way to help operators, maintainers, owners, suppliers and manufacturers – and their people, both blue collar and managerial – to connect and share knowledge about that equipment, in a way which feels quite familiar to users of social media platforms. 

The fourth argument to be made is that Australia’s tech sector has made remarkable progress. Thirty years ago the sector largely comprised Australian branch offices of US vendors; today of course there are multiple Australian owned technology businesses with significant global scale. 

Atlassian for example reports having more than 300,000 customers in approximately 200 countries. Canva cites over 170 million people in more than 190 countries using its products. CSL has 32,000 employees in over 100 countries around the world.

A telling indicator is the growing number of the wealthiest Australians who made their money in tech. Of those listed in the 2024 AFR Rich List, 28 out of 200 made their wealth in technology. The pattern is even stronger for those under 40 on the rich list: 40 out of 100 in 2024 made their wealth in technology. 

By contrast, if you look at the BRW Rich List of 1992, the money typically came from sectors such as property, agriculture, retail and manufacturing.

But the tech sector has not just brought benefits to a small number of very wealthy people.  The sheer number of jobs generated by this sector means it has a major impact right across the economy.  As the Tech Council has highlighted, Australia is on track to have 1.2 million tech workers by 2030.

Public Policy Settings for Science and Technology

There is much to celebrate, then, in the rise of the tech sector in Australia. In the last part of my remarks I want to turn to public policy settings to support science and technology – and the importance of having a tech literate government.

This is important for the tech sector; it is also important for our national economic performance.  Software and digital technology is now central to the competitiveness and performance of every business.

Some years ago I invited the co-founder of an early stage software business to give the JJC Bradfield Lecture.  Scott Farquhar was not as famous then as he is now but his words, ten years later, look very prescient:

Like electricity, software provides an order of magnitude more productivity, paving the way for cost reductions and new products, and transforming how we work as a result. Standing at the start of the 20th century it would have been impossible to overstate the impact electricity would have on our lives. Similarly, as we stand here at the start of the 21st, it is impossible to overstate the impact software will have.[1]

This fundamental economic reality is an important reason why the Liberal Party has been a consistent champion of the tech sector and the digital economy, going back as far as the Howard Government. We established the National Office for the Information Economy in 1997 and legislated to create Early Stage Venture Capital Limited Partnerships in 2002.

Let me touch briefly on three themes you can expect should we return to government. 

The first is backing and celebrating the digital economy - not walking away from it.  Under the Morrison Government we set clear goals to build Australia’s digital economy including the ambition of making us a top ten digital economy and society by 2030 and supported this ambition with a detailed Digital Economy Plan.

By contrast the Albanese Government abandoned the goal of being a top ten digital economy; it does not have a Minister for the Digital Economy; and as I have argued, many of its senior Ministers reflect a union-driven hostility towards technology and innovation. 

Let me touch on one significant issue when it comes to supporting the digital economy – the need for energy as AI and data centres expand dramatically. We know the energy needs of the digital economy will continue to grow, with the number of tech companies globally committing to nuclear energy to power their data centres. The Coalition is very serious about nuclear energy in Australia, and we think it’s very important for the tech sector.

Secondly, under a Coalition government you can expect policy settings designed to boost private capital going into the tech sector, through both early and later stage investment.

The Coalition specifically believes that the role of private capital is critical.  We differ from the current government which all too often thinks that the way to succeed is to throw large sums of public money at a particular project – such as their fundamentally misconceived cash splash in the American company PsiQuantum. 

To be clear we are big supporters of Australia’s world leading quantum sector, and provided considerable support during our nine years in government. But we do not think it is a good idea to allocate nearly one billion dollars of taxpayers’ money to one particular company based on a captain’s pick by a Minister.

Our approach when in government was very different, as for example the National Innovation and Science Agenda demonstrated. Our focus was on attracting more private sector capital, particularly to early stage companies, and on stimulating the growth of the venture capital sector. 

These policies have clearly worked. According to KPMG, in 2014 total venture capital investments in Australia were only around $400 million.[2] In 2022 it was over $5 billion and, even with the recent downturn, it was $2.5 billion in 2023.[3]

So while I’m not here to make specific policy announcements, I will say you can expect us to maintain our focus on the private sector.

A third theme you can expect from us is a focus on digital government, which the Coalition sees as a way to improve services and develop capability. We want to build on the work we did when last in government, including our investment in 2020 to deliver the new MyGov platform. The MyGov User Audit, commissioned by the current government, declared that the new MyGov platform was “well-crafted and implemented.”

Our record in this space has been recognised in the 2023 OECD Digital Government Index, which placed Australia in the top five performing countries. And the impressive work of the former New South Wales Coalition Government, under the leadership of Minister for Customer Service Victor Dominello, shows what can be done to improve the citizen experience of dealing with government when you have a customer service focus and deploy the right technology effectively. 

Yet, oddly, the current Minister Bill Shorten has consciously weakened the technology capability of Services Australia.  He fired more than 1000 specialist ICT contractors, gutting the agency’s capacity to continue to develop its IT systems. According to Services Australia’s annual Assurance Statement, there has been a conscious management decision taken to pause automation processes. 

Conclusion

Let me conclude then by returning to my opening point - it is important for our  technology narrative to be optimistic and confident.

The impressive achievements of the Australian tech sector absolutely justify such confidence. 

If the Coalition returns to government, our aim will be to build further on the growth of Australian science and technology, to create jobs, enhance our prosperity and improve our quality of life.

We look forward to working with this dynamic sector. 

[1] 2014 JJC Bradfield Lecture by Atlassian co-CEO Scott Farquhar, "A Start-Up Nation: Capitalising on the Software Revolution in Australia" | Paul Fletcher MP, Member for Bradfield paufletcher.com.au

[2] Venture Pulse Q2 2022 (assets.kpmg), downloaded 18/10/22

[3] Citation - latest KPMG Venture Pulse