Then, rolling out an inferior tech (compared to fibre) that is only marginally better to current ADSL to the rest which is going to run over an aging copper network that will require billions of dollars of maintenance over the years? All while maintaining the current telco monopoly...
Really, their only selling point is the cost, but I haven't actually been able to find any evidence that the plan is actually costed - every reference to it being cheap is just based on rollouts in other countries with very different geography, population density and existing infrastructure. If they actually costed it, and then took running costs into account, I doubt it would actually be cheaper. And the current, superior NBN isn't even a cost to the taxpayer - it's an investment that will eventually pay itself back with a small profit.
I think the biggest thing though is that even if it were double the price and didn't pay itself back, the economic benefits of having fibre generally available to businesses and homes, as well as having a network which provides open access to suppliers (instead of having to go through the Telstra monopoly) would make it worthwhile.
Not to mention, NBN Corp. will not be any different monopoly from Telstra Wholesale.
And regarding speeds, how is NBN going to solve that? Australia doesn't even have enough international throughput in the current network. NBN will make speeds even worst as the demand will only increase. The bottleneck here is not copper, it is international capacity. What's the point of replacing copper if the weakest link of the network remains.
How is fibre going to a small town like Burnie in the middle of Tasmania going to encourage the creation of technology startups when its users are going to be technologically uneducated in the first place? What will most likely happen is all that bandwidth (paid by taxpayers) will most likely be used for Torrenting music, warez, movies and porn.
As a pragmatist, the NBN rollout should have been targeted firstly for areas of high concentration of startup activity. That way, users most likely to benefit and create wealth from the increase of bandwidth will have first dibs that will eventually trickle down to the rest of the system. Unfortunately, for most short-sighted politicians, the main agenda of the NBN is to buy votes from rural and marginal electorates.
> Burnie in the middle of Tasmania going to encourage the creation of technology startups when its users are going to be technologically uneducated in the first place? What will most likely happen is all that bandwidth (paid by taxpayers) will most likely be used for Torrenting music, warez, movies and porn.
I'll paraphrase your words: Poor/socio-economically disadvantaged people don't deserve nice things, because they are too poor to understand them. Politicians are short sighted for ignoring the rich middle class.
You're view point is exactly WHY the NBN should be rolled out.
The idea that innovation can only come from certain areas is completely baseless. The idea that people in countries towns like Burnie have no use for NBN other than music, warez, porn is offensive. And your concept of wealth "trickling down" has been shown time and time again to never happen.
And the NBN is being rolled out everywhere so not sure where you get this ridiculous vote buying concept from.
When that happens, what good will faster internet in rural areas do?
I am going to take up the offer to email and see how it goes... but I would be surprised if I get an offer which pays enough to actually live in Sydney.
I recently went hunting for jobs and my experience was less then stellar. Many companies didn't even bother sending feedback to coding tests, and one expected me to pay for the Yahoo Boss API and violate Google's terms of service for a test. I will say I had an excellent experience with Hotels Combined though despite declining their offer for personal reasons.
EDIT - Emailed then, and got a response within 1 minute. I will say this for Matt he's very responsive.
Agree that most grads seem to want to avoid coding. Out of my class I think only 1 or 2 actually ended up coding for a living. Not sure why that is in Australia but it seems fairly common.
I think another problem is that there's no one with the -exact- skillset they're after. Why take a chance on a local person that would take a couple of weeks to get up to speed when a foreigner has the exact skillset you're after. Not that I'm against foreign visas, but they do let industry off the hook on the whole training thing to a degree.
I have an advert out at the moment for PHP dev in Melbourne that clearly states we want to pay top dollar.
I'm still only getting applications from web developers who happen to know enough PHP to make them dangerous.
Of the applicants, only four are reasonably interesting.
Three of them are here on 457s.
Just imagine the headlines:
TEN MILLION WASTED ON PHONE APPS
Perth has buckets and buckets of capital. This town is stupidly flush with cash. And Perth's taste for risk is much higher than the rest of country. You can raise tens of millions of dollars for high-risk, high-reward ventures in a relatively short time.
But there's a catch: this only applies if your proposal is to take some geologists and a drilling crew for mineral exploration.
The lifecycle for startups is ostensibly quite similar, but ... no dosh. The local investors don't really want to know about it.
edit:
That said, I wonder if Australia's intelligentsia will ever get over fetishising whatever industry and country which happens to be in the news a lot. I remember endless song and dance about Japanese cars. Now it's Silicon Valley.
Eventually it will be, I dunno, rockets and jetpacks. From Montenegro.
Meanwhile Australia is one of only 3 countries left with AAA rating and is the only country in the world that has had a growing economy for umpteen years. You can go a long way with sensible, basic policy settings.
A pity then that Australia's federal and state government policies (negative gearing, first home buyers grants, interest only mortgages for investors etc. etc.) have done so much to pump up the real estate market into such a huge speculative bubble than will do untold damage when it finally pops.
It's insane what Australians are expected to pay for basic housing in one of the world's most lightly populated countries/continents. Here's an example picked at random: http://www.realestate.com.au/property-house-vic-north+melbou.... 3 bedroom terrace house (i.e., no windows in side walls) in North Melbourne, 1 bathroom, no parking, all yours for a mere $775k at 6.5% mortgage rates.
I was thinking of other things though: floating dollar, low tariffs, relatively light regulation of many subjects compared to world averages, somewhat predictable inflation targeting policy of the RBA and so on and so forth. We get a lot of things more or less right.
Australia has pretty tight land release laws.
If we had more cities with decent jobs you might see housing prices go down or at least go flat.
It's also worth noting that Australian housing was fairly cheap until the early 2000s (excluding Sydney)
Somebody has lots of money, they bloody well ought give me some!
:D
I don't know where you get this ridiculous idea from. Most IT in Australia is actually in software engineering and testing for banks, media, mining etc. Most of the tech support I am aware of is slowly being outsourced.
The USA is a bit overboard on under paying. Minimum wage needs to go up + tied to cpi + fix health care to find a happier medium and build out a strong middle class. This might be our personal style though, but I think its gotten out of hand. I don't want to be Australia.
I think Australia has gone a bit far and the USA not far enough. Somewhere in between is a sweet zone.
Having said that - the LinkedIn article does not actually say much about what Startup Australia actually is. A google search brought me to this: http://www.startup-australia.org/ . The first thing that hit my eyes was a large advert asking if I want to date mature women.... seriously, get some class! Do you really need to fund this with cringeworthy advertising?
The rest of the site is underwhelming, maybe great startup some web design company could take a shot at making it look good.
It includes access to the data used during the workshop
To sure up her base on the left yesterday she came out and attacked the 457 visa and said that they needed to be more tightly regulated, since they are being exploited by some and are taking jobs away from Australians.
Prominent Australian entrepreneurs came out in support of the visa, and argued that you can't grow a new information economy without the importation of skilled labour to make up for the shortfall in local skills. This was the biggest national news item yesterday.
As an analogy, imagine if Obama came out in support of lowering H1B visa's or restricting their use, and the shit that would cause.
The second issue here, which Matt also takes on by attaching it to the first, is what a lot of people in the startup world feel is a disadvantage that the Australian startup ecosystem has over its US, Israeli etc. counterparts. This argument has been playing out for years now, to not a lot of effect.
I think there is a contradiction in this argument, when you combine the two together. On the one hand you are asking the government to leave you alone and let you import labour, but on the other hand you are asking them to do something about the lack of venture investment, the lack of skills, university places, etc.
I think the later argument of asking the government to do something to assist startups stems from a misunderstanding of how silicon valley works and why it became successful. This misidentification leads to a feeling that with one or two changes you could 'clone' what has made silicon valley a success, which is not true.
The attitude in Silicon Valley has always been to be left alone by the government. The tech industry in the USA is grossly underrepresented in Washington lobby groups (only recently have Google, Apple and Microsoft invested more in lobbying as their businesses broaden and intersect areas where government has more control, such as spectrum).
Further to that, Australia ranks well in most global indicies for business startup, running a business and open markets. We actually outrank the USA in ability to start a company, and we rank about even in other business friendliness metrics[0].
I think Australia's major problem is cultural. We have a fear of failure, a lack of entrepreneurial spirit, and a severe tall poppy syndrome (all of which I have experienced first hand - ironically from some of the very people who are most vocal about wanting to make Australia more like Silicon Valley).
These should be a clear indication that the "problem" with the Australian startup scene (if there is one, I don't think there is) is not the cause or fault of the government.
I think Matt would have been better served here to focus his argument on the 457 issue, using the same arguments he has (such as Australia won't always have things to dig out of the ground), but leaving the other issues alone for now.
[0] http://www.gfmag.com/tools/global-database/economic-data/118...
Australia is too closely ranked to other countries with successful startup ecosystems in the major market and freedom indicies. The USA is now going through the long-term capital gains issue, and nobody has suggested that less startups would be founded, or that there would be less innovation because of it. As Warren Buffet says, he has never known an investor to turn down an investment opportunity because taxes are too high.
In fact, there is no capital gains tax. It's all taxed as income. There is no incentive to sweat it out for years building equity because once you exit, you will give an enormous chunk to the government because you are suddenly in a $1M+ tax bracket for that year only.
Their bankruptcy laws also don't reward risk taking as well as the US either.
Austrlaia literally spend more on a single day of gambling (Melbourne Cup: $7.27 per capita) than we do in our entire venture capital industry.
The government have also decided we're betraying the country by "abusing" a visa program to get more skilled programmers here. Of our 12,000 IT graduates, 8,000 of them are from overseas. 4,000 graduates doesn't go very far... Many of the 457 visas would also likely be programmers from international companies staying in Sydney: Atlassian and Google have numerous offices abroad and commonly allow programmers to travel around. The Australian government have no clue what's going on.
Mike Cannon-Brookes, founder of Atlassian, just tweeted "How can you say IT is the future of the country, then complain when we import skilled labour to help us?!"[2]
[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venture_capital
[2]: https://twitter.com/mcannonbrookes/status/312033343988449280
Also that's not saying that all those 4,000 are good graduates. A top tier institution like the University of Sydney might graduate 100 per year. If you look at Sydney city, there might be the same from UNSW, UTS, UWS, Macquarie etc. That leaves it pretty thin on the ground.
With Silicon Beach on and off, Startup Grind, lots of small meetups, and Fishburners in Sydney, there are certainly groups to build this community around but I still think we are years behind the critical mass of something like HN London. And that's just to talk about forums for people to gather in - it says nothing about our skills shortage.
I agree with Matt's points regarding our reliance on the resources industry. So many people head off to the mines on a fly-in-fly-out basis, and make incredible coin - but it won't last long-term and then our skill base will be incompatible with value-adding services industries.
However, I think we need successes before a great weight of people will shift towards STEM disciplines, in the same way that the dot-com frenzy saw Web Development course demand explode.
People who are good at trades are not 1-to-1 exchangeable with people who are good at STEM subjects.
However, before the industrial revolution we were all toiling in fields, so I think perhaps labour is more fungible that you give it credit.
I often get asked why I chose to incorporate in the U.S and take investor money from U.S based investors and not from Australians. This is article explains why.
There is a lot of talk in Australia but very little action - a lot of people calling themselves Angels, VC's, incubators etc. without actually funding any companies, or any decent companies.
The problem is that we lack a lot in both areas. Chicken/Egg.
When a country is rich in natural resources, smart and enterprising people specialize in learning to extract natural resources. This damages the technology sector because talent gravitates todward money in market economies.
Also, the first paragraph of wikipedia's article on dutch disease is flawed. Dutch disease is used by economists to describe when a domestic comparative advantage crowds out another industry. It has nothing to do with manufacturing. The first paragraph incorrectly implies that it has something to do with the manufacturing sector.
Because historically it's been the manufacturing and trades sectors that get crowded out; they are the industries most directly competing with mining for skills and equipment inputs.
They generally have no capacity for risk whatsoever, and unless you're digging stuff out of the ground and razing the environment, there's very little on offer from the Government, either.
So I can see why a lot of tech startups kick-off here and then go offshore because the economic environment is just not conducive to startups (at least in general).
Given how many people small business employs in this country (from memory, its the single largest employer, unlike mining, which only directly employes a low, single digit % of workers despite the mindshare it has) we should be doing everything we can to give people a leg up to start a business.
For example, something like Jon Stewart's proposal for a 'softer cushion for failure' would be a great start. We could do a lot worse here in Australia that institute something like this: http://boss.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/10/18/jon-stewart-propose...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-3_visa
It's a reciprocal visa program between Australia and the United States. Australia offers Americans the friendly 457 visa and the US offers Australians the friendly E-3 visa. It's an independent and generous quota compared to the H-1B visa.
It's surreal to me reading people weighing in so heavily about the difficulty in hiring Australians and ignoring the elephant in the room.
If you are a decently skilled Australian in IT, you get up and move to Silicon Valley. Why?
* More money.
* More respect.
* In the center of your industry.
* Paid travel!
This is the same complaint New Zealand has had about Australia for years too. Kiwis move to Australia for the similar reasons.
Background: I've been on a 457 for two and a half years.
Everyone I know from the US or Europe on a 457 is in Australia for the "lifestyle." The rest are people who came to Australia to study or work from place like India/China/Philippines[1], converted to a 457, and are working their way to permanent residence and finally citizenship.
And you'd be unsurprised how many move to work in the US or Europe after earning their Australian citizenship.
[1] http://www.immi.gov.au/media/statistics/pdf/457-state-territ...
Many Australians talented developer and computer engineers have been flocking to USA for mainly two reasons:
1. They are rewarded more in USA, both socially and financially. Who doesn't want to be in the middle of global innovation among other great people?
2. It is much more prestigious and hard to resist. Many US-based companies have been actively recruiting Australians, for example Amazon.com.
This leave Australia with limited local talents and therefore comes up with need to employ overseas eng-IT professionals. Note that 457 are neither cheap nor simple to lodge and employ. We are currently at a phase where it is necessary to keep feeding our demand of technical professionals to keep the growth of Australia tech industry.
I've only been able to get to one, but it's already given me useful feedback and I met some great people.