Paul Wallbank – Brilliant Communications

Tag: politics

  • Playing Innovation Buzzword Bingo

    Playing Innovation Buzzword Bingo

    One of the frustrations of being a technologist in Australia is how the media, and population in general, doesn’t pay much attention to technology stories beyond the latest shiny consumer device or quirky stories from the weird and wonderful internet.

    So when one of the nation’s main political TV programs, Q and A, decides to do a program on the government’s Innovation Statement with a panel involved in the tech and startup sectors it’s a must watch.

    As usual the Q and A format lets the viewer down with the panel suffering from having an unwieldy six guests of which two are major party politicians who tend to trivialise the discussion with party talking points. Regardless of the topic, the show usually ends up an unsatisfactory experience for anyone wanting to explore the evening’s issue.

    Startup focus

    In the case of last night’s panel the initial focus of  the discussion reflected the startup obsession of most commentary around the Innovation Statement.

    While encouraging Australians to start new businesses and take entrepreneurial risks is worthwhile, it’s concerning much of the thinking is based around the current Silicon Valley startup model which is based on easy access to venture capital and ruthless marketing.

    Coupled with that is a surprising hostility towards the research community and education establishment, while there the panel featured no discussion of how little Australian corporations invest in research or development.

    Lacking diversity

    This little genuine research and development carried out by corporate Australia exacerbates the nation’s poor economic and business diversity. The effects of that are crushing for those studying in high tech fields.

    One audience question came from a young woman, Elana Nerwich who is studying mechatronics. She correctly noted in Australia, it’s unlikely she will get a private sector job in that field and some of the panelists advised her to stick with it and build their own startup.

    While admirable, that advice overlooks how high level workers can’t advance their skills in the Australian economy. This in turn results in more derivative taxi and pizza delivery apps rather than genuine innovations using cutting edge technologies being applied in the private sector, which are the real drivers of economic growth.

    Concentrated economic power

    Another issue for the Australian economy is how the nation’s economic power is concentrated in the inner parts of Sydney and Melbourne, something briefly flagged by panellist Holly Ransom. The startup obsession exacerbates that concentration of talent and business in the same way it does in San Francisco, if anything it illustrates the weaknesses of applying the Silicon Valley VC model to other societies.

    Sadly a deeper discussion on how the Innovation Statement’s benefits can spread beyond the affluent parts of Sydney and Melbourne was beyond the scope or focus of the Q and A panel. That the challenges of regional Australia are restricted to the occasional token program in a country town illustrates both the limitations of Q and A format and the nation’s Sydney centric media.

    The greatest take away from the Q and A innovation panel though was how Australians are dependent upon government. Almost all the discussion around how the nation becomes ‘innovative’ was around government policies and not on how does a nations of complacent conformists create a competitive 21st Century economy.

    Explaining innovation

    Which leads us to the biggest unanswered question from the Q and A show – what does ‘innovation’ really mean?

    For the average viewer watching this program the conclusion would be ‘innovation’ is a meaningless string of buzzwords put together by a group of people lobbying for government support.

    Those pleas for government funding illustrates the greatest weakness in the current Australian mindset, the nation’s real problem is the private sector’s reluctance to invest in new industries and technologies. Rather than throwing money at startup incubators, the most important thing the country’s politicians can do is reform taxation and corporate governance rules to encourage productive investment over property speculation and incumbent ticket clipping.

    Sadly little of that was discussed on the Q and A program partly as a result of its clunky format.

    Australia faces a great challenge in pivoting from a successful late Twentieth Century economy into one that’s competitive in the 21st, sadly the Q and A program format left us with nothing more than more buzzwords while failing to convey the opportunities for the nation.

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  • Rebuilding America’s communities

    Rebuilding America’s communities

    One of the features of the Twenty-first Century will be how communities take over providing their own services as cash strapped governments find it difficult to provide the services citizens expect.

    In many respects the United States is ahead of the rest of the world in this as the decentralised nature of US government sees many functions being the responsibilities of local county and city agencies.

    Following the 2008 financial crisis many smaller cities and rural counties found their revenues crunched, for many of them this compounded thirty years of economic decline as local industries folded or fled overseas.

    James Fallows in the Atlantic recounts a trip with his wife across the United States where they visited communities rebuilding themselves in the face of economic adversity.

    In his long piece detailing how those different communities are rebuilding, Fallows comes to the conclusion a new political consciousness is evolving among the groups working to change their cities. While early, the common objectives of these groups will evolve into a movement.

    Fallows marks what will almost certainly be a defining feature of today’s first world nations as their politics evolve around these movements.

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  • Australia’s contempt for technology

    Australia’s contempt for technology

    “The minister sends his regrets….”

    Yesterday I commented how the Australian Tech Leaders event would be a good measure of the state of the country’s technology industry. Instead it illustrated the sheer contempt the nation’s political leaders hold the industry.

    One of the government’s key platforms in the upcoming election is its Innovation Statement and the accompanying Ideas Boom so it wouldn’t have been expected that a minister or at least an informed backbencher would address a room full of technology journalists.

    Instead the government drafted one of their local MPs, Fiona Scott, to make the short drive up the hill from her electorate to haltingly deliver a poorly written speech that focused on her local electorate issues.

    To be fair to Ms Scott, the outer Sydney suburban seat she represents is a bellweather electorate which tends to swing between parties as government changes. It also happens to have a workforce that’s beginning to feel the effects of a shifting economy. Her focus on local issues is understandable.

    However as a member of a government aspiring to drive a technology driven jobs boom and the representative of an electorate whose workforce is in transition, it is remarkable that Ms Scott is so poorly briefed on tech issues.

    What’s even more remarkable is the contempt shown by the government towards the country’s technology sector, a long standing problem in Australian society but particularly stark with the current administration given the Prime Minister’s fine words on the topic.

    One of the saddest things about Australia’s squandered boom is how the nation turned inwards at the beginning of the Twenty-First century and decided to ignore the global technological shifts.

    The contempt shown by the current government towards the technology sector shows a much deeper problem in the Australian mindset, if the country is to rely on more than its luck in the current century then it’s essential to shake off that way of thinking.

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  • Gen X and the big economic shift

    Gen X and the big economic shift

    The single economic event that defines Generation X was the 1973 Oil Shock, the OPEC embargo on the west bought the post World War II era of economic growth to an end.

    With stagflation gripping the western world, new solutions were sought and by the end of the decade governments touting ‘business friendly’ economic policies – more accurately ‘corporation friendly’ – were seen as the solution.

    As Robert Reich described in the New York Times, these policies were not only a disaster for workers but also for the middle classes and business productivity.

    US-economy-employment-wages

    A notable aspect missing in the above graph is US productivity growth has since stalled as corporations have focused on stock buy backs rather than investment. The problem has been compounded by the use of tax shelters that have resulted in huge amounts of American corporate profits being locked away in offshore bank accounts.

    While those stock buy backs and arbitraging tax regimes have benefitted executives and a small cabal of fund managers, the diversion of capital from productive investment has weakened the US and global economy.

    For the baby boomers, even those of the Lucky Generation who preceded GenX, that lack of investment now threatens their retirement lifestyles as incomes and government spending stagnates.

    The ‘big business friendly’ ideologies of Thatcher and Reagan defined the late Twentieth Century and continue to dominate government thinking in much of the western world, it may be though that we a reaching the end of that era as the costs to the broader economy are beginning to be recognised.

    For GenX and their kids, the costs are being borne now but their parents may be about to feel the costs too.

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  • Cutting through Australia’s innovation rhetoric

    Cutting through Australia’s innovation rhetoric

    Four months ago, the Australian government launched its innovation agenda with the noble ambition to put the nation “on the right track to becoming a leading innovator.”

    The keenly awaited innovation statement was seen as a defining the new Prime Minister’s agenda after two decades of complacent political leadership. At the launch of the paper Malcolm Turnbull said “our vision is for Australians to be confident, embrace risk, pursue ideas and learn from mistakes, and for investors to back these ideas at an early-stage.”

    One of the early stage investors currently investing in Australia’s startup sector is Brisbane based entrepreneur, and Australian Shark Tank judge, Steve Baxter who spoke to Decoding the New Economy last week about where he sees the strengths and weaknesses in the proposals.

    Beating the rhetoric

    “Competitive threats are far more effective than rhetoric from a Prime Minister,” says Baxter in observing what really drives adoption and change while emphasizing that the announcement is a welcome shift,  “the change in messaging from the government has been very important. It’s having an impact and a future looking message has been fantastic.”

    While Baxter is positive about much of the incentives on offer and the importance of changes to regulations around bankruptcy and treatment of business losses, he flags the the delay in implementing the tax incentives as being a problem.

    Too focused on commercialisation

    Baxter though has been a long standing critic of Australia’s research sector and the emphasis on commercialisation of academic work is in his view one of the Innovation Statement’s major weaknesses, “commercialisation is a concept that we’ve failed at. It’s dead. We’ve put so much money into it, it’s actually embarrassing. We need a new mindset towards it.”

    “there are seven hundred million dollars of a billion going to the research sector. That’s not entrepreneurship. In fact universities and research institutes are the least entrepreneurial organisations you’ll ever come across.”

    “We need more business model innovation, we’re seeing too many people in lab coats with synchrotrons, square kilometre arrays which we have to do,” Baxter states. “What we’re not seeing the Dropboxes and the Instagrams and the Facebooks and the Wayze’s, the cool stuff that doesn’t need a two hundred million dollar building.”

    Thin pipelines

    As an early stage invest Baxter sees the real challenge for Australia lies in encouraging individuals to launch their own ventures, “I don’t think we’ve done enough yet to prove we have an investment problem when it comes to early stage companies,” he says. “I don’t believe we have a lack of capital”.

    For those starting their own ventures, Baxter sees the word ‘innovation’ as being a barrier in itself.
    “The entrepreneurs I back aren’t those who say ‘I’m going to innovate’ but those who say ‘I can see a problem’.”

    While Baxter doesn’t say this, the real challenge lies weaning Australians off property speculation and encouraging investment and risk taking, something that requires major tax and social security reform.

    Sadly, the Turnbull government has abandoned the prospect of any immediate taxation reform and even the Innovation Statement’s more modest agenda is now in doubt as the nation’s febrile Parliament prepares itself for an early election.

    Baxter’s views, and his optimistic but guarded outlook towards the Innovation Statement reflect the opinion of many of those in the Australian investment community, it would be a shame for the country if the current opportunities are lost for short term political maneuvering.

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