“No matter what cyclical downturns tech may face, it is here to stay. It is going to keep growing, and our future prosperity depends on it.”
At the National Press Club of Australia today, our CEO Kate Pounder made her address on ‘What’s Next for Post-Pandemic Australia – Challenges, Threats and Opportunities in 2023’. Kate spoke about:
– What it will take to meet our shared commitment with the Government to reach 1.2 million tech jobs by 2030
– Supercharging investment and reigniting productivity growth
– Playing to our tech strengths to create new economic opportunities across Australia
– Securing our future by better preparing Australia for cyber threats
Watch Kate’s full address: https://iview.abc.net.au/show/national-press-club-address
NATIONAL PRESS CLUB SPEECH
15 FEBRUARY 2023
FULL TRANSCRIPT
Thank you, Emma and Women in Media.
I begin today by acknowledging the traditional owners of the land on which we meet the Ngunnawal and Ngambri (nam-bri), people. I pay my respects to elders past, present and emerging.
I want to start by reassuring you that my speech was not written by ChatGPT, but by humans.
Tempting as it was though, as the CEO of a non-profit organisation, to log on and ask ChatGPT:
Please write a speech about Australia’s post-pandemic opportunities and challenges, in the style of …..Michelle Obama.
When interest rates go high, tech goes low….
That is a joke by the way… my team and I did write this speech.
I have enough regard for the national press club journalists here today to know they would see through an AI-written speech in a heartbeat.
Our target – creating $250 billion a year in value for Australia
My message today for our nation’s policymakers and people is: No matter what cyclical downturns tech may face, it is here to stay. It is going to keep growing, and our future prosperity depends upon it.
The Tech Council’s goal is that by 2030, tech activity across all industries in Australia will contribute $250 billion a year to GDP.
We also want 1.2m people in tech jobs, and for Australia to be the best place in the world to start and scale a tech company.
It’s absolutely crucial to our country’s future.
If we want to remain one of the world’s most prosperous economies and equal societies, we must keep investing in technology.
We must create new companies, grow new jobs, and train more Australians for them…
…because technology isn’t just a sector on its own. It is embedded in everything we do.
Banking, mining, shopping, entertaining, caring, educating… You name it, without tech you can’t do it.
Anyone following the way tech is helping the Ukrainians in their fight for freedom will know that the tech sector is crucial to our national security too.
Just as much as mining and agriculture and education, tech is our future.
But we need to take this moment to shape the future we want with tech, not let tech shape us.
Don’t confuse a blip with a trend
Tech has been in the news recently, not just for ChatGPT and for the visit of Bill Gates, but because there have been some prominent lay-offs at tech firms right across the world.
Big numbers. Big names. Big news.
It would be a bigger mistake, however, to make important decisions about Australia’s long-term future based on them.
Bill Gates once said “people overestimate what they can do in one year, and underestimate what they can do in ten years.”
That rings true for me because my career has spanned the peaks and troughs of different tech waves.
I grew up in a very small country town in South Australia. We had a manual telephone exchange, operated by a lady named Bev, that was used into the 1980s.
Our regional TV station received shows on such a long delay that moments of national heartbreak – like the death of Molly on a Country Practice – occurred a year later in my town compared to the rest of Australia.
In one of those strange twists, my first job after university was advising the federal government on national tech policy.
In January 2000, this seemed a great career choice. Dial-up internet had become mainstream in homes and at work, accompanied by alien sounding beeps. New internet companies like Yahoo were making it possible to search the “Information superhighway”. Silicon Valley was booming.
But in March 2000, the dotcom bubble burst, and the Nasdaq fell. Companies failed, investment in tech bombed, jobs were cut.
The internet clearly had no future. It was all hype.
So I decided to specialise in broadcasting. [PAUSE]
I took a job in the media. Established, and in every Australian home, it seemed so much more interesting and secure than the speculative “information economy”.
But I underestimated how much the world would change in ten years.
Broadband, mobile internet, video streaming, and social media took off.
These innovations generated new industries, jobs and growth.
They made businesses more productive, and allowed consumers to get digital services from shopping to entertainment when and where they needed them.
And within 7 years my safe job in the media was made redundant.
In a stroke of luck, I got a job working on tech policy again.
My career goal for this decade was to not get fired.
Instead, I got a series of incredible job opportunities. My focus on tech led me to work for global consulting companies, the nation’s top ICT research institute and at a fast-growing and innovative Australian analytics start-up, AlphaBeta.
Once again, I’d underestimated how much could change in 10 years, including for the better.
Because the downturn that ended my first tech career turned out to be a blip. Tech’s rise was inexorable.
The reality is that the tech sector is one of the biggest and most reliable generators of jobs in Australia.
Young people – in fact people of all ages – who enter it have a great future ahead of them.
Especially if we get the policy settings, training and investment levels right.
I was bad at picking the future in planning for my career because I based my expectations of what would happen in a decade on what was happening in one year.
It’s why the recent gloom and doom about the tech sector exposes the fallacy of short-term decision making.
Or if I could put it another way, never confuse a short-term cycle for a long-term trend.
The high profile layoffs we’ve seen lately are due to the short-term problems facing all industries: the uncertainties and disruptions to global supply chains created by the COVID pandemic and the war in Ukraine, followed by the rise in inflation and interest rates.
Not a great environment for encouraging investment in any industry, and especially not in innovative industry sectors like tech.
Blips like this will come and go, but they can’t and won’t change the trend that more of our jobs, and more of what we make in Australia, will rely on tech.
That’s the future we have to start building for today.
1.2 million tech jobs by 2030
The type of jobs we do in Australia are changing and at every step tech is grabbing a growing share of them.
Over the last year to November 2022, despite all the issues Australia has faced, and despite layoffs at tech firms, the number of tech jobs increased by 9 per cent to over 900,000.
This is part of a multi-decade trend.
Over the last 10 years, tech jobs have grown at double the rate of jobs growth across the economy.
That’s right: double!
This trend has withstood multiple downturns, such as the dotcom boom, the GFC, the pandemic and even now the recent tech contraction.
The reason for this trend is that the economy and workforce are digitising across the board.
Around sixty percent of tech jobs are outside tech companies in Australia – and those industries are still hiring.
But for the last decade, the number of people training for and entering tech jobs has remained far lower than the jobs available.
Almost unbelievably, there are roughly the same number of Australians undertaking IT bachelors degrees today as there were in, wait for it, 2002. That’s back when broadband barely existed, when phones only made calls, and before Facebook was founded.
Our children would not recognise that world. They would complain if they had to live in it now.
And yet, today we are still training Australian teenagers as if that is the world they will work in.
It’s why it’s more important than ever that we bring Australian’s career goals, and our training and migration systems, into the 21st century. And stat.
Because without this change, Australians will miss out on opportunity.
And our economy will face a major structural tech skills shortage across the economy of around 180,000 skilled tech workers by 2030.
But if we can fill that shortfall in the next decade, we’ll prevent future tech skill shortages that will otherwise hold our economy back.
We could certainly make a big dent in major social problems related to youth and mature age unemployment and under-employment.
And we would also improve the quality of employment – because compared to other employment sectors, tech jobs are high-paid, flexible, more productive and have half the gender pay gap.
My first appeal to governments across Australia today is therefore to double-down on addressing the tech skills shortage.
That’s why in late March 2022 the Tech Council of Australia was proud to join the now Prime Minister, and Ministers Ed Husic and Chris Bowen, to commit to having 1.2 million people in tech jobs in Australia by 2030.
We made the commitment to give Australians confidence about their careers over the long-term. We stand by it today.
To get there, we will need 170,000 first-time workers, and 300,000 reskilling and upskilling workers by 2030.
To help more Australians get into these tech jobs there are several things the Tech Council believes we should do:
- Inspire more Australians to consider tech careers
- Get the right training pathways in place
- Encourage women, older Australians, people from regional areas, Indigenous Australians and people with disability into tech jobs
- And make sure our skilled migration system is as responsive as it can possibly be.
Progress is now being made, I’m happy to say.
In particular, we welcome reforms promised at the Jobs and Skills Summit.
The TCA has promised to rollout virtual work experience in new careers to high schools across Australia.
We strongly support Minister Husic and O’Connor’s efforts to design a new, modern digital apprenticeship scheme for both new and reskilling workers.
And we welcome Ministers O’Neil and Giles’ increased investment in visa processing by the Government.
We believe our migration system should maximise the economic benefits of skilled migration for Australians.
It’s why we have advocated for a prioritisation of employer-sponsored skilled migration, streamlined arrangements for high-salary visa applicants, and internationally competitive visa processing times as part of the Migration Review.
Fixing this system is important to improving the workplace for all Australians. Our gaps in tech are generally in highly experienced, highly technical roles, and for people with experience leading global companies.
We need to fill them to provide a better coaching and workforce experience for the hundreds of thousands of Australians coming in from training and work pathways.
Change is being led outside government also.
I’m passionate about improving gender diversity in tech.
I don’t think it’s yet appreciated that many of the biggest tech companies in Australia are headed by female CEOs. That includes Mel Silva at Google, Pip Marlow at Salesforce, Vicky Brady at Telstra, Kelly Bayer Rosmarin at Optus and of course, the TCA’s Chair, Robyn Denholm, who is also the global Chair of Tesla, and a Partner at VC firm Blackbird.
We also have incredible leaders in our start-up and scale-up community, like Mel Perkins of Canva, Katherine McConnell, the founder of Brighte, Dr Michelle Simmons at Silicon Quantum Computing and Mina Radhakrishnan at Different. And of course, in science leadership, we have Dr Cathy Foley, our National Chief Scientist and Dr Bronwyn Fox, the Chief Scientist at the CSIRO.
Change is occurring at the grassroots level, too.
Geek Girl Academy is an Australian initiative to help women, girls and families find their people and place in tech. It introduces them to industries including games, startups, 3D printing, drones, space and aviation.
It was founded after Australia ran the first all-female hackathon in the world in 2014.
When the pandemic saw children in many places across the country in lockdown, many young people were unexpectedly shifted into online classes.
Girl Geek Academy had been planning to host face-to-face work experience programs for high school girls in partnership with Microsoft, and when that was no longer possible they turned to building a supportive online community of more than 1000 high school girls learning to build A.I.
But with lockdown 4 looming over Melbourne, the girls were apparently worried that they’d have to return to online classes and that that was “the worst thing ever”.
Girl Geek Academy CEO Sarah Moran was confused, and pointed out to the girls that they were already in an online class, and the girls informed her: “But Sarah, this isn’t a class, it’s a community!”
For Sarah, that’s the key to the program’s success. It’s not about fixing women, or “encouraging them”, it’s about giving them space to build friendship and meaningful support to each other when it’s most needed.
For example, First Nations leaders Indigitek run programs in remote areas bringing incredible tech skills to young indigenous Australians. Celeste Carnegie travels from North Queensland to teach kids how to build and code their own electric vehicle using LEGO mindstorms.
Executive women in corporates like Dayle Stevens at Telstra use their experience as business leaders to build successful Women in Tech programs within larger organisations, ensuring these programs have a line item attached in the company budget and inclusion metrics are part of a leader’s KPIs.
But there is more we need to do, with only around one in four roles in tech held by women.
There are good economic reasons to help more girls and women to get into tech jobs.
Claudia Goldin, a Harvard Professor of Economics, tracked the work and care patterns of women in the US over 100 years. She found that occupations in areas like engineering, computing, science and pharmacy are amongst those that have best enabled women to balance work and family.
It’s no coincidence she also found that these are some of the highest-paying industries that have the lowest gender pay gaps.
The reason is that STEM jobs allow more substitutability within the team over the tasks they do.
It means women and men can stay in senior roles more readily as they begin to balance caring responsibilities.
This is a tough time for the sector, and I am sorry for anyone who has lost a job, or for a company that has had to let valued staff go.
But as a nation, we have to keep our eyes on the horizon.
The opportunity in tech jobs remains big.
We cannot take our foot off the accelerator in driving the long-term reforms to realise it.
Supercharging investment
My second plea to Australian governments is to get the policy framework right so we can get investment in new ideas, new industries and productivity up.
As I said, we want tech activity to contribute $250bn to GDP by 2030.
Yes, investment might be down from recent record highs, but good ideas survive such temporary downturns and flourish.
And flourish they will if we get policy right.
The policy prescriptions relevant to all industries apply to tech.
Things like the right tax system, the right R&D incentives, the right foreign investment policies, and the availability of long-term patient public capital to complement the private capital market.
Patient public capital – the National Reconstruction Fund
Let me focus on that last point.
The Australian tech sector sees a crucial role for government in providing patient capital for longer term, strategic investments.
A big debate is underway but there’s nothing revolutionary about this sort of role for government.
Emerging industries and technologies have always been funded by a mix of private and public capital.
Governments across the world have typically funded basic research in universities and public research institutions, such as CSIRO.
US Government defence funded research famously supported the invention of the Internet and autonomous vehicles.
Israel has long used small, strategic amounts of public capital to attract private investors to high-value, strategic sectors.
In Australia, the Clean Energy Finance Corporation and the Medical Research Future Fund are helping to grow our renewables and medical research capability.
Meanwhile, the private sector is the source of new ideas, new companies, new growth and new jobs. It’s also the key funder for these companies, such as through venture capital.
It was reforms to the tax treatment of early stage venture capital by the last Government that expanded Australia’s VC market, leading to a blossoming of local tech companies.
With such successful precedents in mind, the Tech Council supports the National Reconstruction Fund, as part of a wider suite of investment approaches.
We believe the Fund can complement private sources of funding for long-term strategic, emerging technologies and industries.
The $1bn critical technologies target in particular has an important role to play in funding long-term, strategic opportunities in the national interest.
The design and implementation of the fund will be key to its success. It’s why we look forward to working with government and other stakeholders to get this right should it pass into law.
Private sector investment – a national investment allowance for priority sectors
We also need to increase private sector investment through the right incentives.
Without it, our target of a $250 billion per annum tech sector won’t be reached.
Tech drives competitiveness, but competitiveness also drives tech.
It’s well-established that high-performing companies are the ones most likely to invest in innovation.
They are also the kind of companies we need to back in our economy right now to get productivity up.
That’s why one of the major recommendations in our recent budget submission was the establishment of an investment allowance to incentivise investment in priority areas of the economy.
This allowance would let businesses immediately deduct a share of significant investments in innovative and productive areas. It would cover both tangible and intangible assets.
It would give innovative companies across the economy, who are focussed on solving big challenges, a stronger incentive to invest. That includes in equipment to make their businesses more efficient, but also in developing software to make their products work better.
It would encourage existing businesses to bring forward investment over the next 12 to 18 months, when global economic conditions are expected to be tough, boosting our national productivity into the future – the best way to reduce inflation.
It will spur business investment in new technologies, such as quantum, AI, cyber and biotech.
These measures will help get inflation down, while getting investment up.
That’s because this type of business spending will increase productivity, letting us do more with less.
It’s the only recipe for a high standard of living, without a high cost to Australians’ hip pocket.
Regulatory reform to encourage further investment in tech
We need to invest urgently because we’re in the middle of a global tech arms race.
It is now both a security and economic necessity to have a strong local tech ecosystem producing, attracting and training globally competitive products and people.
Stretched Treasury coffers alone can’t provide the capital that local and global markets can.
That’s why one of the best ways governments can help businesses access funding, talent and customers is by getting their own regulations and processes right.
There are lots of good examples of this already underway, like the Simplified Trade System reforms.
But we now need to look at areas, such as Australia’s foreign investment review process. It’s the 34th least efficient foreign investment review process amongst 38 OECD countries. That places Australia behind allies like the US and UK, and countries such as Turkey, Poland and Chile.
These types of reforms are necessary to grow Australia’s critical tech industries, such as quantum and cyber.
Research by the Tech Council has shown these industries are more dependent on global funding, networks and specialist expertise. Australia’s quantum sector attracts 3.6% of all finding invested globally in quantum, despite Australia having 1.6% of GDP.
It’s why we have suggested that when governments seek to apply restrictive regulation to a critical tech industry, they should find a countervailing regulatory offset that improves an administrative process or burden.
And there are many more smart reforms to government services and processes on offer.
Tackling them as a priority will improve productivity, and citizen and business experience.
Punching further above our weight
Success in tech is definitely possible. There is much cause for bullishness.
Despite having just 1.6 per cent of global GDP, Australia is now creating 2.3 per cent of global unicorn companies, which are worth at least $1 billion.
This includes companies like Airwallex, Atlassian, SafetyCulture, Canva, CultureAmp and many more.
We have also attracted some of the world’s largest global tech companies and investors to Australian shores, such as Microsoft, IBM and Amazon Web Services.
Few Australians probably realise, but software was Australia’s most successful new industry of the last decade. Australia and New Zealand have a particular strength in designing software for small to medium businesses.
Cloud-based companies like Xero, Deputy, and Employment Hero have put critical accounting, rostering and payroll software into the hands of small businesses for the first time.
It’s helped small businesses lift their productivity, steady their cashflow, and save them from admin so they can spend more time on their business.
Now, a next wave of companies is being created drawing off Australia’s strengths in traditional industries, such as agriculture, education, mining and finance.
And as tech spreads, it is creating opportunity across Australia.
Firmus – a young Australian company has created one of the world’s most environmentally sustainable data centre technologies from its R&D base in Northern Tasmania. It is working with global tech leader NVIDIA to deploy AI technology to existing data centres to reduce their environmental impact and running costs.
Meanwhile, Airtrunk is investing in world-leading data infrastructure in Western Sydney, while exporting their technology across Asia to Singapore, Hong Kong and Vietname.
Quantum Brilliance is building quantum computer products based on synthetic diamonds in Canberra, and testing them on the Pawsey Supercomputer in Perth.
Lumination in Adelaide and Go1 in Logan, Brisbane, are changing how kids and small businesses learn.
We may not be able to match the spend of big nations like the US and China, but we can absolutely match their smarts.
Securing our future
And one of the tech areas we need to be smart in is cyber security.
I therefore want to end with a third call to action – how we can help protect Australia from cyber threats.
We shouldn’t simply accept that an ever-increasing number and severity of cybersecurity incidents is the cost of doing business online.
We’ve overcome huge safety challenges in other areas of life.
Thanks to sustained incremental technology and policy improvements, far fewer people are dying on our roads.
We can make this sort of progress again with a national culture of cyber safety, implemented through a real partnership with industry, government and the community.
It’s the prime example of how we can use this current moment to build the country we want in 10 years.
The Tech Council believes there are four essential components to lifting our cyber resilience:
- A new national cyber security plan underpinned by effective coordination between the public and private sectors.
- A strong pipeline of cyber and tech talent.
- Better use and adoption of technologies, like digital identity and verification, that can help prevent or reduce the damage caused by successful cyber attacks.
- And a modernised legal framework fit for the digital age that creates the right incentives for organisations to invest in the appropriate collection, use and protection of data.
Creating the necessary cyber workforce will bring wider benefits to the whole country.
LinkedIn data shows that Australia’s workforce of cyber security professionals has grown by over 80 per cent between December 2018 and December 2022.
However, despite this strong growth, according to Per Capita, we need 8,000 cyber workers now and will be short 30,000 workers in four years.
These jobs are not only essential to protect our nation, they pay well and will help reduce the gender pay gap.
A great example of this is Amber Spence, who joined the Aussie consulting firm CyberCX in 2020. She’s a former touring rock musician, a mum, and now, thanks to a CyberCX Women in Cyber scholarship, an ethical hacker in the Security, Testing and Assurance practice.
I know how important opportunities like this can be. I lost my job when I was home on maternity leave. Getting a new job, in a flexible, fast-growing industry, gave me the opportunity to start again.
It’s why I want to see more opportunities created, for more women and Australians.
So that in the next decade, there will be thousands more stories like Amber’s to tell.
Conclusion
Making these reforms won’t be easy.
But it will be necessary if we want to maintain our standing in the world.
We have to start the policy reform and the investment now – with a view to where it will take us ten years from now.
It’s about ensuring our future economic security and our future national security.
Because tech is about all our industries, all our jobs and the quality of life of all our people.
Despite our current economic lows, we must still aim high and think long term.
We have to get policy right, and opportunity and investment rising.
If we do, we will lay the foundations for an even better future for our children, our communities, and our country.
