Paul Wallbank – Brilliant Communications

Category: government

  • Do you really want help from the government?

    Do you really want help from the government?

    Pity the public servant who stands up in front of a room and asks a bunch of business owners, executives or managers what they want from government.

    While there will be plenty of comments about improved procurement, less red tape and reduced fees you can be sure there’ll be plenty of demands that the government ought to subsidise something – anything – that business does.

    It’s notable how free enterprise, small government and low taxation loving business people will  drop their copies of Atlas Shrugged and barge their way to the feeding trough and the slightest scent of taxpayer money wafting in their direction.

    But is government money really good for a business? In many cases it isn’t.

    You run a business, not work in a government department

    “Who pays the piper, calls the tune.” The whole idea of running a business is that you are the boss, so why do you want to answer to a government department?

    If you’re self employed or just opened a startup, one of the main reasons for doing so is because you decided you no longer want to work for the man. A government grant may well open up a whole new world of paperwork that leaves you wondering why you ever left the cubicle.

    The dependency culture

    One of the dangers of government funding is if you are successful, you’ll find yourself hooked on it. Quickly you become better at filling in funding applications than delivering products your customers want. The Aussie film industry is a good example of this.

    Governments are behind the innovation curve

    Public servants are not employed to take risks, this is a good thing as it’s our money they are handling.

    Because governments are risk adverse they’ll only recognise an industry – or a problem – long after it has become established.

    If you find you are on the government’s help list, it might be time to consider an exit from a troubled industry.

    Do you really have a business?

    Many new business owners expect the government should do something to assist them in their start up phase. This is a common complaint from under capitalised proprietors.

    Given the massive subsidises given out to the banks and other big corporations since the start of the great recession, this attitude can almost be excused but we can already see how well that strategy works.

    If you really need a subsidy to run your business, then it’s time to consider whether you should be in business at all.

    This isn’t to say all government funding is bad; well thought out programs help viable businesses with things like export assistance, skills development and employing young or disabled workers. There are many of these although the process of identifying what a viable business is usually eliminates the newest and smallest enterprises.

    What is notable with the successful government programs is they address a specific need, they don’t have onerous paperwork and they are no substitute for a healthy, living cashflow and profit.

    Overall though, if you really want government money then take a job with the public service. It’s a lot easier than scrabbling for grants.

    Similar posts:

  • Digital art is more than iPod wielding basket weavers

    Digital art is more than iPod wielding basket weavers

    This is a transcript of the digital arts opening keynote for the Digital Culture Public Sphere conference discussing the Australian government’s cultural strategy.

    Thank you Senator Lundy. A little bit more about me, as well as being a writer and broadcaster on change I spent 18 months with the NSW Department of Trade & Investment setting up the Digital Sydney project.

    Digital Sydneyis a program designed to raise the profile of Sydney as an international centre of the digital media industry.

    One of the problems with Digital Sydney was that it was very inner Sydney centric and this is a perennial question we face as to where does Australian culture, and art, spring from? The first idea I’d like to throw to the room is that ‘digital’ frees us from many narrow geographic boundaries.

    When we add the term ‘digital’ we hit another problem, that almost every aspect of our lives – be it in art, business or our personal lives – is being affected in some way by the Internet and digitalisation. In reality all art is becoming ‘digital’ in one way or another.

    As broadband becomes more pervasive, particularly as the National Broadband Network is rolled out, we’ll see art and the creative industries become even more digitised.

    In many ways we are today at the point in history not too dissimilar to that our great grandparents found themselves a hundred years ago. In 1911, our forebears couldn’t imagine the massive changes the century ahead would bring and we’re in a similar position in the first decades of the digital century.

    The first half of the Twentieth Century saw radio start a cultural shift which was accelerated in the second half as television radically changed and redefined our culture. Today the Internet is doing exactly the same in ways none of us quite understand.

    Given the massive disruption and technical advances we’re going through we need to be cautious about being too prescriptive as we can’t foresee many of the new technologies that will become normal to us over the next decade.

    This provides a challenge for government agencies supporting the arts as the established gatekeepers such as galleries, production studios and regional organisations become less relevant as the means of distribution evolve and become easier to access.

    We’re already seeing the traditional model of government support to big producers; be they factories, movie producers or games studios suffering as economic adjustment undermines many of their business model. The old economic development models are becoming irrelevant as history overtakes them.

    It may well be that the role of governments over the next decade is to create a framework that allows new mediums, creation tools and distribution channels to develop.

    One area we should be careful of when looking at the digital future of the arts is not to follow the UK’s Digital Economy Act where the protection of existing rights holders took precedence over the creative process.

    It is important that governments create legislative frameworks that balance the rights of all stakeholders, consumers and new content creators with the objective of encouraging new works and innovations to evolve.

    In an Australian context we need to acknowledge and develop our diverse population and the opportunities this presents. Our indigenous and immigrant communities with their artistic and cultural traditions give our national economy advantages that many other countries lack, this is one thing I regret I wasn’t able to push more in my role with the NSW government.

    Education is another critical area, this isn’t just in the arts but right across Australian society and industry as new entrants into the workplace are expected to spring forth with the skills making them as productive as experienced workers, this is clearly a flawed idea, particularly when many of the tools business expects students to be skilled in weren’t invented when the students started their studies.

    Over the next decade we’ll also have to confront one of the great Twentieth Century conceits; that artists are a separate breed from scientists, Engineers and business people.

    Prior to the beginning of the last Century it was accepted a tradesman or inventor could also be an artist and this damaging idea of silos between creative and so called ‘real’ industries, suited only to a brief period of our mass industrial development, will have to forgotten. This will be a challenge to our governments, educators and training providers.

    The digital arts are not about iPad wielding basket weavers, they about giving today’s workforce the creative tools and flexible, imaginative thinking to meet the challenges our mature, high cost workforce faces in a world where the economic rules are changing as fast as our technology.

    We have a great opportunity at events like today to determine how we as a nation will benefit from the next decade’s new technologies that will change our arts communities and society in general.

    The great challenge to policy makers will be dealing with the rapidly changing and evolving world that the digital economy has bought in the arts, in business and in society in general.

    Today I’m sure we can bring together ideas on how we, and our governments, can meet these challenges.

    Thank you very much Senator Lundy, Minister Crean and Pia Waugh for giving the community an opportunity to contribute to the development of this valuable policy.

    Similar posts:

  • Newcastle as a Smart and Innovative City

    In today’s modern world, success is determined by our ability to come up with unique, smart and innovative ideas. It has become the key economic driver for cities and regions as they increasingly compete with other places for attention, investment, visitors and talent.

    Newcastle City Council recently released their 2030 strategic plan to become a Smart and Innovation City to help Newcastle develop a healthy, diverse, creative and resilient economy.

    But, how do you create a culture of new ideas? How do you attract smart people? How do you turn an Old World City into one the World’s Smartest Cities?

    On June 29 2011, The Lunaticks Society of Newcastle will host some of the most creative minds in Newcastle from business leaders to content producers for an evening of thought provocative discussion, collaboration and lots of smart ideas on how to construct a Smart and Innovative City.

    Speakers/Panelists

    MC: Paul Wallbank – author, tech writer and radio presenter

    Featured speakers include: Greg Hall – writer and movie producer, Simon McArthur & Jill Gaynor -Newcastle City Council and Carol Velduizen – Senior Research Fellow, Hunter Valley Research Foundation. More speakers to be announced…

    Venue: Delany Hotel, 143 Darby Street, Newcastle

    Date: Wednesday, June 29 2011

    Time: Starts 6.30pm – Ends 10pm

    Don’t miss this event! Book at the New Lunaticks website.

    Similar posts:

    • No Related Posts
  • Skilling for the future

    Skilling for the future

    Tonight we see the first budget of the Gillard government and one of its stated priorities to get the long term unemployed, disabled and single parents back into the workforce.

    This is welcome in a society where we are facing skills shortages, the effects of an aging population and a developing global race for talent that is steadily making the old model of importing immigrants to cover workforce gaps no longer viable.

    For those who’ve been out of the workforce for a long period the biggest challenge is acquiring the skills they need for the modern economy, to work in most industries today means using technologies that weren’t around five or ten years ago.

    Like many ideas that come out of Canberra, the scale of this task seems to be underestimated by the public servants, politicians and the media reporting their plans. Training those currently excluded from the workforce is going to take more than a visit to Centrelink.

    To give these folk marketable skills is going to require rebuilding our adult education and TAFE systems that have been systemically allowed to run down by governments over the last thirty years. That in itself is a major task that neither the states nor Canberra seem to have the appetite to address.

    One of the big challenges with bringing disadvantaged groups back into education is transport, the colleges and teachers are often a long way from the students who usually face a convoluted and time consuming public transport journey to get the colleges and schools.

    This is where technology comes in with access to the internet and online learning tools. Developed sensibly, broadband access can create relevant community learning centres along with individual in-home training.

    We should be careful though treating technology as the only solution, one of the essentials for using computers and the Internet effectively is literacy and that’s a big challenge for many of these groups and something that is going to take a lot of investment in well trained and motivated teachers.

    Those education investments, along with the spending we’re committing to the National Broadband Network, need to be co-ordinated and this seems to be where the Federal and state governments really drop the ball with poorly thought out, short term schemes.

    For businesses, those last thirty years of government neglecting adult education have seen us neglect training as well. We’ve thrown much of the training burden onto reluctant governments or increasingly asked workers themselves to pay for training out of their pocket then moaning when new staff don’t have the skills we need.

    That indulgence is running out as we begin to face the inevitable consequences of failing to train young workers coupled with the demographic certainty of an aging workforce.

    We can hope our governments can deliver on their promises but we shouldn’t wait on them, even they get it right this is a project that will take years to bear fruit, we need to be starting right now with our own businesses and staff.

    Training all workers, managers and business owners is a great opportunity to build new industries and use the web to give people the skills that will make them valuable members of their community.

    Our days of complacently expecting workers to have the skills we need from the day we hire them are over, if they ever existed. We have the tools to fix the problems ourselves and we need to start now.

    Similar posts:

    • No Related Posts
  • The global online sales battle

    The global online sales battle

    Gerry Harvey’s and Bernie Brooke’s Fair Go for Retailers campaign drawing attention to the GST treatment of online overseas purchases is part of broader battle being fought around the world between multinational corporations, governments and small business. How it is resolved is going to affect all of us.

    Last week, while Australians were focused on their major retailers campaigning for changes to GST rules, Internet retailer Amazon wrote to its Illinois affiliates warning that should the state legislature pass a law imposing sales tax on Internet purchases, the company would cut off their partners in that state, just as they already have in Colorado.

    The actions of the Colorado state government, the Illinois proposal and Amazon’s ruthless response are just the latest phase in a longer term struggle between borderless online retailers and those governments, and businesses, limited by their physical locations.

    What’s making this particularly acute in the United States is state governments are struggling to balance their budgets and sales tax is the one of the few avenues they have to raise revenues in an economy where incomes and property markets continue to stagnate, if not fall outright.

    That balancing act isn’t just confined to the US, the UK government has increased VAT rates from the beginning of the year for the same reason and is facing discontent over increasing tax burdens, particularly on fuel prices.

    For the moment the UK government and customs authorities seem to be fairly relaxed about the leakage of VAT income that has seen some British supermarket chains shipping online orders from their Channel Islands branches to avoid local taxes in the way Gerry Harvey and Bernie Brookes proposed last December when the floated the proposal to move their online stores offshore.

    The British public hasn’t shared their government’s sanguine response with organisations like UK Uncut blockading stores accused of dodging taxes or owned by alleged tax avoiders.

    Governments aren’t the only ones affected, while in Australian it’s the retailers who are publicly worried about their loss of sales at present, other sectors, particularly those providing business to business services, are even more at risk.

    Last month The Economist described how US law firms are seeing high margin but relatively low skilled work moving offshore to India and it’s likely those contractors are offering similar services to Australian law firms and corporate clients.

    Online bidding sites such as Freelancer.com, O-desk and 99 Designs are offering almost every business support service imaginable, from virtual offices to logo design. Anyone competing locally against foreign contractors on those sites starts from exactly the same GST disadvantage as Harvey Norman, Myer and the local shoeshop.

    The power of international retailers and service providers like Google and Amazon to avoid taxes and deliver lowest cost products to customers are challenges to both businesses and governments.

    Julia Gillard’s and Bill Shorten’s almost condescending responses to the retailers shows the politicians are somewhat more in tune with the public mood than the retailers. But we can be sure that should the porridge in Australia’s Goldilocks economy start going cold, then Treasury will start looking for those lost GST dollars.

    While we can criticise Gerry Harvey, Bernie Brookes and the others behind the “Fair Go for Retailers” campaign for being out of touch and failing to respond to obvious threats to their markets, most businesspeople – and politicians – shouldn’t think for a moment they are immune from the same forces the retailers are complaining about.

    Few of us, whether we run businesses or not, will be untouched by these forces realigning the global economy. We all need to understand what these changes mean to our livelihoods and investments, lest we get caught out like Australia’s big retailers.

    Similar posts:

    • No Related Posts