Griffin on Tech: Aussie Budget light on tech, Kiwi whistleblower speaks
With a general election looming across the Tasman, Australia revealed its federal Budget this week, signalling a return to fiscal deficits and little in the way of new funding for tech and digital economy-related initiatives.
That’s not particularly surprising given the big ticket items the Australian Government has had in the tech and innovation space in recent years, including substantial spending on cybersecurity, scientific research, and last year’s A$940 million investment it made in Aussie quantum computing startup PsiQuantum alongside the Queensland government.
Incidentally, that investment, which was roundly criticised at the time for a perceived lack of due process around the investment decision-making, appears to already be a successful one. This week, PsiQuantum said it was raising US$750 million in capital at a valuation of US$6 billion. That’s around twice the valuation the company had in 2021 when it previously raised money, so the Australian Government’s stake will have received a decent bump in value.
PsiQuantum is building the world’s first quantum computer for commercial use in Brisbane and the federal government funding came in the form of A$125 million in cash and a A$475 million loan, part of which was also set to convert to equity. It was all part of Future Made in Australia, the country’s big high-value manufacturing push. There’s a lot of expectation around PsiQuantum, but it definitely shows the virtues of making some strategic investments in tech at a national level.
That’s definitely what consulting firm Boston Consulting Group is recommending for New Zealand as it poses the question: what will New Zealand be known for in 2025? I caught up with BCG’s Kelly Newton this week and she told me that to revive economic growth, New Zealand would do well to focus on promising industrial ecosystems in five key areas - agriculture 4.0,
space and satellites, green tech, the future of medicine and creative industries.
“We don't want to pick winners,” Newton told me on The Business of Tech podcast.
“Some of that is maybe afraid to say no or afraid to be wrong,” she added. “I would frame it as we can gamble on potential happy accidents and hope that something works out … but that's also really difficult to develop any kind of expertise in because you can't anticipate what that might be. My position would be that those happy accidents can happen even if you're placing some strategic bets.
In other words, if we are serious about capitalising on our strengths in those five areas, we need to get more strategic about our approach to them as other countries are doing. Artificial intelligence was absent from Aussie’s budget as schemes to address cost of living increases dominated and big-ticket items like the National Insurance Disability Scheme, aged care and defence soaked up the most significant funding increases.
Australia is forecasting a budget deficit in 2024 - 2025 of A$27.6 billion (1% of GDP). not a bad position for the Labor Party to be going into the election campaign.
Among the tech-related items Australia is actually spending on in the next year is digital health reform, with A$228.7 million committed to upgrading the country’s My Health Record system, A$151 million to enhance the NDIA’s fraud detection IT systems, and A$207 million to continue upgrading tech systems at regulator, the Australian Securities and Investments Commission.
While funding for science and innovation paled in comparison to previous years, Australia did chip another $48 million into its Square Kilometre Array project, which New Zealand withdrew from several years back, and is boosting CSIRO to the tune of A$55 million. The Office of the Australian Information Commissioner also got an additional $14 million to deal with a backlog of complaints.
In comparison, it will likely be another year of slim pickings in our own Budget in May, with defence one area expected to get a significant top-up as we seek to upgrade our ageing naval fleet and the US admonishes its allies for underspending on defence.
Careless people
If you want some sobering weekend reading, pick up a copy of Careless People, Sarah Wynn-William’s powerful insider account of her seven years spent working at Facebook. Even better, pick up the audiobook, which is narrated by Wynn-Williams. You’ll notice her Kiwi accent. Wynn-Williams pulled out all the stops in her attempt to land a job at Facebook back in 2011. She totally bought into Mark Zuckerberg’s vision to connect the world’s people on his platform.
She landed the job and went on to become Facebook’s head of global public policy, but lost her idealism in the process as she dealt with leadership that wasn’t willing to face up to the harm that its social media platforms were causing. It’s a real eye-opener, particularly the chapters on Facebook in Myanmar and Mark Zuckerberg’s efforts to bend over backward to appease the Chinese Communist Party in a bid to get Facebook into the Chinese market.
There haven’t been many author interviews with Wynn-Williams around the book launch because Facebook owner Meta was successful in getting a gag order in place due to the fact that Wynn-Williams had signed contracts with her employer that had non-disparagement clauses in them. Still, 60 Minutes was able to record an interview before that silencing effort had its desired effect, and it’s also worth a watch.
Whistleblowers have provided incredible revelations about the leadership culture at Big Tech companies in recent years and Wynn-Williams carries on that theme, showing the devastating real-world consequences when billionaires ditch the ‘do no harm’ idealism for pragmatic profit taking.
