Tim Watts (Gellibrand, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Assistant Minister for Communications) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I move:

  That this House:

(1) notes that:

(a) according to a report released last month, Australia's Digital Opportunity, Australia is lagging behind global peers and failing to capture the economic opportunities of the rapidly growing global digital economy;

(b) Australia ranks second last among OECD countries for relative size of our technology sector and its contribution to the economy; and

  (c) the Australian tech sector could create an additional $50 billion per year were Australia successful in catching up and matching the tech sector growth rates of our global peers;

(2) recognises that the Government released 'Australia's Tech Future' which read more like a promotional brochure than serious strategy—it described initiatives already in train, was vague on targets and outcomes—and, importantly, offers no bold vision to drive growth in our digital economy;

(3) further notes that under this Government Australia is suffering from record low wages growth, more than a million Australians underemployed and a per capita recession; and

(4) calls on the Government to urgently take a coordinated approach to the digital economy.

Given half a chance, Australians can compete with the best in the world in any sphere, including the digital economy. Take Eddie, a software package developed in Sydney in the 1990s, which enabled filmmakers to create visual effects at one-10th of the cost of rival products and was used in the Oscar-winning special effects in The Matrix. There was wi-fi, which was a spin-off of CSIRO's radio astronomy research and which has transformed the way we use technology in every office and home in the developed world. More recently there has been the Jira software development package, which has made Atlassian a billion-dollar homegrown tech giant.

Aussies can invent incredible things. They could invent even more if their government backed them in. But the tired, third-term Morrison government has digital economy policy set to autopilot. Despite the slowest economic growth since the global financial crisis, rising unemployment and underemployment, and declining living standards, with a productivity recession underlying it all, this government seems content to allow Australia's digital opportunity to remain unrealised. The best it could do was an underwhelming strategy document, quietly released last Christmas, titled 'Australia's Tech Future'. It was scant on detail and failed to tackle Australia's serious policy challenges around digital regulation and skills shortages. As a result, 12 months on, a recently released report—prepared by the consultancy group AlphaBeta for the Digital Industry Group, an Australian industry association—titled Australia's digital opportunity argues that, if we stay on the same trajectory, Australia will miss out on the tech sector contributing $207 billion to GDP per year by 2030. We need to do better. We can learn from Australian success stories in this endeavour.

To this end, I recently caught up with the House House team in Melbourne, the game studio behind possibly the best thing to happen in 2019 the Untitled Goose Game. This is a game about a horrible goose ruining a lovely morning in a small English village and sold 100,000 copies in the first two weeks after its release in mid-September. It is the latest in a long line of globally successful video games developed by small-team indie developers in Australia. They join the likes of Halfbrick's Fruit Ninja, Hipster Whale's Crossy Road and, my daughter's personal favourite, the Mountains development team's Florence, which won an Apple design award at the 2017 Apple Worldwide Developers Conference.

Video game sales in Australia exceeded $4 billion in 2018, up 25 per cent on the previous year. That's bigger than the film and TV industries in Australia. It's exactly the kind of growing digital economy industry that the government would be backing if it was serious about creating jobs in the growth sectors of our economy. Canada is a great case study about what's possible. Thanks to the support of the Canada Media Fund, their video game industry is one of the biggest in the world—21,000 full-time employees contributing $4.1 billion to the country's economy. The contrast with Australia is stark. Rather than backing this growing industry, upon coming to office the coalition abolished the previous Labor government's $20 million Australian Interactive Games Fund. It also continues to exclude the video game industry from any of the tax concessions available to film and television production in this country.

Labor understands that, if we want to harness the potential of the video game industry, government needs to be actively involved in job creation in this space. That's why Labor is hosting a creative economy summit next year, to hear from creatives like House House about the conditions that enabled their success. House House told me that it wasn't a coincidence that Untitled Goose Game was created in Victoria. There is an existing game design community in Melbourne that traverses universities and the private sector and is located in collaborative workspaces like The Arcade. There is also a state government that's prepared to financially back the sector. A series of Film Victoria grants enabled House House to market their games and to port them to new platforms in order to grow their business at key moments of their development.

The team at House House raised a less obvious point about the role of government in supporting job creation in creative industries, but it is an important point: the need to increase the Newstart allowance. To support the growth of the digital economy, the creatives who are on the vanguard of innovation often need to be able to pay the rent and survive while they take a risk and commercialise their work. House House is a great example of how, when you back Aussie creators in the digital economy, they can compete with the best in the world. Australia needs a government that backs creators like this across the country and that gives them the support they need, when they need it, to take on the best in the world.

David Gillespie (Lyne, National Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I thank the member for Gellibrand. Is there a seconder for the motion?

Josh Wilson (Fremantle, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Assistant Minister for the Environment) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I second the motion and reserve my right to speak.

Julian Simmonds (Ryan, Liberal National Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise to speak about the digital economy, in response to the motion moved by the member for Gellibrand. Obviously the digital economy has unleashed enormous potential for Australian residents and Australian businesses, but it still holds enormous potential. I think all of us in this parliament are keen to see Australians achieve their ambitions and to unleash the potential that is available to them. We are a long way from that old comment 'Everything that can be invented has been invented,' attributed to that poor commissioner of the US Patent Office in 1899. We know that that simply isn't the case and that there are many, many digital marvels to come, in front of us.

But where I take umbrage with this motion and the member for Gellibrand's speech just before me is that, once again, it's a classic example of Labor seeking to talk down our economy, to talk down the opportunities. At the end of all that, what was the member for Gellibrand's prescription but yet another summit? We don't need to keep talking about this. We have a road map that the government has put in place. We need to get on and help Australian businesses to harness their potential. There is enormous potential to improve productivity and create jobs. To do that, the digital economy must be considered as broadly as possible, across the whole spectrum of the economy. It is not to be pigeonholed, as perhaps the member for Gellibrand tried to do, in the games sector, although people are doing amazing things in the games sector. It really presents an opportunity for the whole economy, and particularly for SMEs. This is where the biggest productivity boost can come from.

We don't want to try and be, in Australia, the next Silicon Valley. We don't want to specifically target just the creation of the next college tech company. We want to help enable SMEs to achieve their tech goals, to take on board and adopt that technology which is right for their business. This is very important, and it's a difference of approach. We don't want to force every small business to be up in the cloud, but we want to encourage those businesses for which perhaps a cloud based payroll system would be best and would help them improve productivity and help them to make those decisions. We want to be there for those businesses that could help boost their sales by being part of the online marketplace and help support them to make those decisions.

The government is obviously ambitious in this space. We are ambitious for Australians, as they are ambitious for themselves. And why wouldn't we be? The ingenuity of Australians is second to none. But we need to take a considered approach. As I said, a lot of time and treasure can be put into trying to create the next Silicon Valley, when what is needed is for us to encourage those tech entrepreneurs that we have, to keep capital here in Australia when it has so many other global opportunities, and to play to our strengths. Certainly we are good at games, but in the mining, agricultural and health sectors—areas where we have global competitive advantage—our tech entrepreneurs can apply their know-how to help us create productivity gains.

There is the fantastic example in Brisbane of RedEye Apps, a tech company focused on enabling the mining sector. Why are they based in Australia? Because some of the biggest mining players in the world are here. They have structured their business and employ now almost 100 local residents. Their app helps mining companies keep their documents together in a cloud based solution. They have rightly identified, as other tech entrepreneurs have, that, in our leading sectors like mining, health and agriculture, they can develop tech based businesses around those big customers in Australia like they can do nowhere else in the world. That is our technological advantage.

But we also want to make sure that we're dealing with the digital economy in a considered way, because there are challenges. We need to make sure that there is proper data security, something that I'm passionate about. But that is a strength in itself for Australia. We are leading the world in terms of data security. That's a service that we can offer, as part of the digital economy, to other parts of the world. We want to make sure that our kids are protected from digital exploitation as well. This is something that a lot of Australians are concerned about and it's going to require us to upskill our kids significantly, to make sure that we are dealing with the threat of bullying and sexual exploitation online. And we need to continue to meet the demand for more tech workers by making sure that the skills are there in universities, like the University of Queensland in my electorate.

Josh Wilson (Fremantle, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Assistant Minister for the Environment) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I'm glad to speak on this motion on the digital economy, and I thank the member for Gellibrand, the shadow minister for communications and cybersecurity, for bringing it forward. I can't think of a person in the parliament, actually, who's brought his interest and knowledge to this particular issue more consistently than he has. And it should be a matter of great concern and much sharper focus because of the social and economic importance of digital technology and because Australia is not achieving its potential when it comes to the digital economy. The country that played a key role in developing wi-fi technology, and with a past record of early and rapid adoption of digital communication, should not find itself ranked second last in the OECD when it comes to the relative size of our tech sector. On the contrary, the tech sector and the benefits of digital innovation should be a major contributor to all areas of our economy that are currently lagging—namely, good-quality jobs, increased productivity, greater fairness and more equal and flexible workforce participation.

Unfortunately this government, in all its guises—the Abbott version, the Turnbull version and now the Morrison version—not only has neglected the tech sector but also has been a dead hand on this critical aspect of our current and future social and economic wellbeing. And it's done harm in all the key areas: in education, in digital infrastructure and in the form of hastily and badly fashioned regulatory frameworks. Let's start with infrastructure. It is a shame that we're second last in the OECD for the size of our tech sector. But is that any great surprise, when we're currently ranked 62nd in the world—and falling—for broadband speed? We have the 13th-largest economy in the world. We're a nation that prides ourselves on scientific innovation and our capability to deliver first-rate infrastructure, yet in the first five minutes of this now third-term government the decision was made to base a 21st-century broadband network on 19th-century copper wiring. So, at a stroke, Labor's fibre-rich and futureproof national broadband network was thrown out and replaced by the multi-technology mess that is providing a broadband service that's more or less obsolete on delivery. In Western Australia we have the worst of it. Despite being the largest and most remote state, we have the slowest broadband speed of all the states and the highest proportion of substandard services.

There's no doubt that for a dynamic tech sector to flourish you need a carefully designed regulatory framework. That isn't easy to achieve. It does mean balancing imperatives that can run counter to one another, if you consider on the one hand access to data for the purpose of national security and on the other hand privacy and freedom from surveillance and the kind of system integrity that is an essential aspect of high-quality tech business products and services. In that context we can only look back with dismay at the telecommunications assistance and access bill, pushed through on the basis that it was an emergency of sorts, in the last few days of the 2018 parliamentary year. In keeping with that sense of panic, the government turned its back on important amendments recommended on a bipartisan basis by the Parliamentary Joint Committee on Intelligence and Security. Those amendments addressed very significant concerns in terms of the impact on companies in the tech space and in relation to crucial civil liberty protections. Labor supported the legislation on the basis of the apparent urgency but conditional on a promise from the government that the relevant amendments to the bill would be picked up as soon as possible in 2019.

Well, here we are, at the end of that year, and the only thing we have to consider is a bill that allows a further extension of the review process out to September 2020. Meanwhile, everyone in the Australian tech sector and many in the international tech community regard that law as establishing an effective moratorium on large-scale investment collaborations and start-ups.

Finally, if we want Australia to achieve its tech sector potential, we need to make sure that our education system is calibrated to that end. On that count, I want to acknowledge the work of the member for Chifley, who led the way for a series of policy announcements during the last term of parliament, including a commitment to deliver 5,000 free TAFE places in ICT education and the establishment of an AI centre of excellence that would bring together business and academic expertise. The value of those kinds of supportive measures was in turn reinforced by the Leader of the Opposition in his 'Jobs and the future of work' speech the other week in Western Australia.

I'd also like to acknowledge the work of the member for Hotham, the shadow minister for innovation, technology and the future of work in terms of what she has done to carry forward Labor's work on digital preparedness. As she has rightly argued, if we want technology to work for us and to improve our lives, we must have the right policy framework in place. So I support this motion. Australia should have a flourishing tech sector, because we have the appetite for innovation and because we need the jobs and the productivity that comes with it.

Helen Haines (Indi, Independent) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I commend the member for Gellibrand for his motion. We in regional Australia are highly alert to these concerns because we understand the gaps in service, delivery and equity. I came to this place to talk positively about what we hope to start in regional Australia. I said that the federal government had a big role to play in that, supporting better connectivity, rail, internet, mobile phone coverage and access to health and education.

It's connectivity that advances opportunity in a country like ours. In this context, I was encouraged to read in the Australian Digital Inclusion Index 2019 report Measuring Australia's digital dividethat my home state of Victoria this year achieved an index score of 63.3 points. This is 1.4 above the national average of 61.9 and ranks Victoria second in the federation. Victoria has better access, digital ability and access affordability scores than all other states and territories, except here in the ACT. But I was startled to see that the northern Victorian communities, which include those in my electorate of Indi, scored lowest on the measure of every component of the index for the state. For access, we rank last. For affordability, we rank last. For digital ability, we rank last. Overall, my communities and our neighbours on 53.9 points are 11 behind Melbourne and almost 10 behind the state and eight behind the nation.

In February this year, the House of Representatives Select Committee on Regional Australia delivered its report called Regions at the ready. One of the 13 recommendations was:

… that the Federal Government increase its investment in building enabling infrastructure to improve connectivity, key services and amenity through coordinated regional plans.

As I recounted in my election campaign speech, in April this year, so many people tell me of their frustration with NBN and the remaining mobile phone blackspots, businesses whose EFTPOS machines are out for days, kids who need to be driven into town in order to access the internet and do their homework, isolated people in danger of bushfire, and elderly people trying to access the My Aged Care website.

Business Wodonga chief executive Neil Aird last week told my office that digital access for 340 members who employ 7,000 people—almost 17 per cent of Wodonga's population—remains below par. This is in Indi's largest community. On one level, an accounting firm battles slow digital access speeds and bottlenecks, limiting service. On another, poor mobile coverage affects stallholders' ability to transact sales on digital card readers at Albury Wodonga Farmers Market, Beechworth Farmers Market and Oxley Bush Market.

At the same time, in Indi, we're alive to the prospects of a vibrant digital economy and the significance of digital inclusion and confidence. In Wangaratta, a $300,000 state grant through the Ovens Murray Regional Partnership has funded a digital hub. People of all ages, backgrounds and digital abilities are engaging in workshops, making new connections, discovering tools and developing skills to access the digital economy. The hub is working with robotics and coding enthusiasts, start-ups and animators. It's also looking at ways to extend literacy that can improve health.

Studies show that those who are older, disabled or on low incomes have the most to gain from digital technology, yet they are over-represented among the three million Australians who are not yet online. One example is remote patient monitoring. There is compelling evidence from Australia and overseas that remote patient monitoring significantly improves patient health outcomes for the management of chronic disease. It also realises a five- to six-fold return on investment through reduction in hospital presentations and early management of symptoms. But it takes digital confidence to use this technology and affordable digital connection plans, two things that are still missing in my community.

So how can we deliver that access and the confidence that builds better health outcomes? If we in this parliament are governing for all Australians—the quiet and the noisy, the urban and the rural—we need to deliver equity of service, access and opportunity. A cohesive, inclusive and comprehensive plan for regional Australia can shape this prospect and enable all of us to share in the benefits. I call on the Minister for Regional Development to get on with the recommendations of the Regions at the ready report. It's almost one year old but it's yet to walk. I'm eager to work with you and your government to close the digital divide and, most especially, close it in my electorate of Indi.

David Gillespie (Lyne, National Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

There being no further speakers, the debate is adjourned and the resumption of the debate will be an order of the day for the next sitting.