Well, it’s wonderful to be back at the fourth Innovation Showcase of the Tech Council. It’s hard to believe it’s only been four years that this event has been on the calendar because it feels like such a fixture, and it has become one of the most vibrant and exciting events in our calendar. 

I want to acknowledge my parliamentary colleagues who are here today – Andrew Leigh, Assistant Minister for Productivity, Alex Hawke, and our co-chairs of the Parliamentary Friends of Technology, Allegra, Aaron and Jerome. There you’ve got a red, a blue and a teal, so you’ve got all your bases covered. 

I want to acknowledge the Tech Council of Australia. Thank you so much, Kate. Thank you, Damian, for the incredible way you lead the sector. You’re so widely respected in this building, and we’re lucky to have your advice in government. And to you, Scott, we are thrilled to have you as a partner. Australia is lucky that you built Atlassian and chose to locate it in Australia. And we are lucky that you’re now turning your mind and efforts to building the Australian tech ecosystem. We’re thrilled to work with you on that journey. 

The Tech Council has made an enormous impact in an incredibly short space of time. It’s hard to believe how young this organisation is when you think about the impact it has in our national conversation. The Tech Council is not just contributing to our national debate on technology; it is shaping our national conversation. 

In its first year the Tech Council set a benchmark for technology jobs. Since then, it’s secured key investments in the tech sector. It’s shaped our thinking on skilled migration, it’s contributed to our direction on AI, cyber, quantum, workforce and many other areas. And that impact, the impact of the Tech Council on Australia and on the government, is one of the reasons why it’s been such a thriving organisation so well supported by the more than 150 members who have now joined. 

I want to say to all the members of the Tech Council welcome – welcome to Parliament House. It is great to have you here. Great to have you here as innovators, great to have you here as employers, great to have you here as sources of excitement for Australia’s future. 

Some of you I worked with in my previous career before Parliament, and so I have a sense of the excitement of what it is to work in your businesses. And there are few things more exciting in a career than building a business at the edge of technology, and that is what you have the privilege to do. I'm thrilled that you do that, and I'm even more thrilled that you want to come and participate in growing that ecosystem right across the country. 

As the Assistant Minister for Technology and the Digital Economy, I’m seized by the challenge in front of us. I think it’s an exciting challenge but also an enormous one. Our success in the digital economy and in the tech sector has a lot riding on it. In fact, nothing more – nothing less than our national prosperity. It’s easy to take for granted in a country like Australia - our prosperity, our wealth as a country, the opportunities we have for our kids, the quality of our schools and public institutions. But the truth is that none of those things are guaranteed. All of them have to be built and all of them have to be maintained in a strong economy. 

In 2005 I lived in the UK and then went to work in the United States, and at that time the GDP per capita, the national income, of both of those countries was roughly similar. A small difference – the US was slightly ahead. That was 2005. It’s now 2025 and the GDP per capita of the United States is now 44 per cent higher than the UK. Forty-four per cent higher – nearly twice as wealthy. That has consequences for public services, for opportunity for jobs, for employment. 

And as my former colleagues at the London School of Economics have explained, that difference, that divergence between the United States and the United Kingdom, is in no small part due to the difference in the success of their technology sector. The US has Apple, Microsoft, Google, Nvidia that have driven productivity growth, grown employment, and make up a huge chunk of their equity markets. The UK and Europe have been less successful. 

The East London Tech City – aka the Silicon Roundabout – is no Silicon Valley. And I tell you this because it’s important - because our national prosperity isn’t something that we can take for granted. The UK couldn’t take it for granted back in 2005 and Australia can’t take it for granted today. 

We are in the middle of decade-low economic growth and low productivity. And those things are a bit like boiling the frog – you don’t really notice them over one year. Over a few years it’s a small change – again, hard to feel strongly. But over decades that difference in growth and productivity is the difference between the United States and the United Kingdom, between Australia and Argentina, between Argentina and Albania, between Albania and Algeria. The difference between these countries is our cumulative economic growth and productivity. It makes literally the world of difference. 

And in Australia our prosperity has been set up by thriving sectors like yours backed by reforming governments throughout our history. In the 80s and 90s we had reforming governments in Australia that saw future opportunities, that could see the key dynamic in the global economy was internationalisation. And they put through a series of reforms that enabled Australia to create a meal ticket in that era of globalisation. And if I look forward today and think what is that big thing that is an opportunity for us, what is that thing that’s going to make a huge difference over the next 30 years to our prosperity, that big trend is digitisation and the growth of the tech sector. How governments navigate that, how we seize those opportunities will determine our future prosperity – whether we’re on the US trajectory or whether we’re on the UK trajectory. 

So, what is the Albanese government doing about this? How are we making sure that Australia seizes this opportunity? Well, we have a strong agenda right across the economy and in tech specifically. And I want to describe it over the course of the last term and this term as macro and micro. And in some senses, macro before micro, because the macro is important. Unless you have those stable foundations of a strong economy, it’s hard for anything you do in the micro economy not to get swept away by those greater forces. And in the last term we had a significant stabilisation of the Australian economy: inflation coming down from something like six to something like two and a half; interest rates from going up very steadily to now beginning to come down; the deficit from being very large to being now much smaller with two budget surpluses. 

These macro foundations are the important precondition for driving micro economic growth in sectors like the tech sector. And the government is doing this across many dimensions. Firstly, we are building the digital infrastructure that will be the backbone of the tech sector for Australia’s future. We’re connecting the nation, we’re upgrading the NBN, we’re supporting more subsidy cables, improving regional connectivity. We’re supporting and attracting data centres. We welcome investment in data centres in Australia. We want to maximise that investment and we want to put it to good use to drive Australia’s digital future. 

Just a few weeks ago the PM was in Seattle announcing a $20 billion investment from Amazon. And similarly, we have a fantastic local data centre industry, and I want you to know that the government supports you, we’re behind you and we’ll be driving to build stronger data centre infrastructure in this country. Second, we’re backing technology right across the technology spectrum and TRL levels. The NRF has been investing in technology companies. Our Industry Growth Program has been focusing on commercialisation, and we’ve made investments in quantum, cyber, space and AI, and we are only getting started. 

Third, we want to focus on making it easy for you to do business. That means making sure we have the right regulatory environment, the right skills environment, the right tax environment. And the Treasurer has set up a big conversation coming up in the next few weeks about how we set up an economic platform for Australia that enables you to do what you do best. And that Economic Reform Roundtable will have a specific focus on technology, and the Treasurer has outlined his focuses in that area, especially in AI. 

I will finish by saying that events like these fill me with optimism. The more successful you are, the more successful Australia is. The more innovative you are the more productive Australia is. We want to promote great Australian companies like the companies in this room, and we want to attract big investment. In this room, we’ve got lots of smart people working hard for your businesses and working hard to make Australia and our world better. I want you to know that government is your partner. We’re here to learn from you, we’re here to help you and we’re here to deliver the same mission that you have. Thanks very much.