Forget mining – focus on tech, start with the children – Map for Australia’s future

Australia is in the midst of an economic existential crisis, and the way out lies with entrepreneurs who are willing to build innovative global companies, and Australia as a nation moving away from its reliance on resources. 

In order to make tech a welcoming and equal place, WiseTech Founder and CEO Richard White said, there was a need to turn attention to the education of younger generations and reach right back to very early childhood and equalise the male-female bias.

Mr White’s remarks were made at the ACS Reimagination Thought Leaders’ Summit in Melbourne on a panel about building a global technology business, and were reported by Denham Sadler in ACS Information Age. 

“We cannot rely upon mining to employ the future generations,” Mr White noted, adding that the growth industries of the world are largely centred on tech, and there is therefore a need to explore how Australia as a nation can turn an analogue economy into a digital economy.

Australia needs to become a space which can begin to properly embrace tech and support start-ups, he said. Without this key shift, Mr White noted, the nation “will remain merely a consumer of new technologies”.

It’s a binary choice, he asserted: “We either do it, or we get it done to us.”

“To build a future advanced economy that moves aggressively away from mining we need to build a powerful future innovation capability out of what is currently a very, very small part of our economy.”

The discussion panel included Nearmap CEO Rob Newman, Expert360 CEO Bridget Loudon and GHD Digital president Kumar Parakala, all of whom discussed their own experiences of taking their tech companies global and the difficulties they faced.

To read the full coverage of the story as written by Mr Sadler, please see here.