Why is it that 90% of the stories we hear involving Australia and technology are about stupid moves by the government? Is there something unique about Australia?
1. Australia has a history of communications ministers who are simply inappropriate for the role (google: "worlds biggest luddite").
2. The latest minister, Senator Conroy, and his government choose to focus their political will and energy on attempts to censor information and apply control over what Australians can and can't see on the Internet.
3. This is largely because the sitting government has an interest in pleasing an organisation called "The Australian Christian Lobby", who have openly, publicly and repeatedly called for censorship of the Internet. The ACL influence a significant voting block across a large number of constituencies.
4. The news from down here regarding the intersection of Government and technology seems bad because there isn't any good news to plug the gaps between the bad news.
5. The government does very little to foster an environment to encourage entrepreneurship or technical innovation by start-ups and micro-companies.
6. Finally, Australia doesn't have a bill of rights. Unlike the US and England, the High Court doesn't always have the final say on matters. The government is relatively free to introduce laws where it needs to in order to continue it's agenda (getting reelected).
And to end on some good news, the government did recently open a new fund to be managed by local VCs, of which at least some of it will trickle through to Internet technology startups:
http://delimiter.com.au/2010/11/08/80m-splash-carr-fills-up-...
Is it something to do with a vitamin D overdose?
That said, it's somewhat interesting this is being linked from here now, it gives the impression that this is an attempt at damage control over cablegate on the part of our idiot politicians, but if you look at the release date of the linked article this is completely unrelated to the recently released cables.
Yes.
Australian cultural DNA is a weird hybrid of the US, UK with it's own particular mutation. Despite being blessed with a large land mass, Australia is devoid of imagination and cannot successfully combine technology and entrepreneurship like the US. It has the smarts but lacks the sophistication of public relations and finance of the UK.
At a political and business level we seem to get stuck with leaders who revel in being 50 years behind the times.
So call us primitive if you like, but look at what your sophistication has brought you.
By lacking sophistication, I mean a system of alternative capital (VC) that fully recognises Startups as a serious way to generate wealth instead of say lending money for property development, mining or agriculture.
"... So call [us] primitive if you like, but look at what your sophistication has brought you ..."
I'm Australian ~ http://www.flickr.com/photos/bootload/sets/72157601280899273...
You're right, it's yet another aspect of the "Australian invents something, Australia refuses to invest, Australian goes overseas and makes tons of cash" phenomenon.
That's definitely changing, e.g Innovation Bay, Startmate, the Sydney Angel Sidecar Fund, and others. VC/Angel investing is not at the same maturity as overseas yet, but it's definitely changing.
For example, the leverage of the Commonwealth Bank of Australia is about 19:1, where most of their assets are residential mortgages :
http://www.intelligentinvestor.com.au/articles/Commonwealth-...
I find a little scary if charts of house prices such as the following are correct:
http://www.debtdeflation.com/blogs/wp-content/uploads/2009/0...
I walked 240km (Canberra to Kosciuszko) earlier this year on a bet made on the housing bubble ~ http://www.flickr.com/photos/bootload/collections/7215762379... and the most interesting thing I learned was how broken economic models really are.
I'm not sure how accurate that is though - India has on occasion banned books (like Salman Rushdie's work) to prevent potential civil unrest. But there are similar precedents in the USA.
Few notes:
The Indian Penal Code, framed by the British in colonial times, contains a number of laws that make giving offence a crime, and throttle free speech. For example, there’s Section 295 (a), which makes it a non-bailable offence to “outrage religious feelings or any class by insulting its religion or religious beliefs.” There’s Section 153 (a), which seeks to punish “any act which is prejudicial to the maintenance of harmony between different religious, racial, language or regional groups or castes or communities”. There’s Section 124 (a), which prescribes life imprisonment for anyone who “by words or expression of any kind brings or attempts to bring or provoke a feeling of hatred, contempt or disaffection towards government”—something that any critic of any government could be accused of.
The constitution, framed not by the British but by the freedom fighters who got us independence, cops out when it comes to free speech. While Article 19 (1) (a) pays lip service to it, Article 19 (2) lays out “reasonable restrictions” such as when it applies to matters such as “public order” and “decency or morality”, matters which are, of course, open to interpretation. I’d love it if we had something like the First Amendment of the US Constitution, which contains no such caveats—but sadly, we don’t.
From: http://indiauncut.com/iublog/article/such-a-wrong-journey/
This is smart politics. The government tells Australia's religious kooks that it's on God's side. Meanwhile, the civil liberties mob focuses on something the government can't do, and it gets up to worse bastardry with less embarrassment.
How about Wireless networking? http://www.csiro.au/science/wireless-LANs.html
You're welcome.
http://www.csiro.au/news/CSIRO-wireless-team-wins-top-Aussie...
Maybe not a startup in the strict sense of the word, but pretty close - especially when you consider the limited funding available to most scientists.
There are plenty of awesome things happening in the Australian tech scene. Unfortunately the tyranny of distance and lack luster investment and government support means we can struggle a bit to get our message out. I know of a bunch of people with fantastically profitable businesses servicing international user bases that you won't ever hear about.
Because they're not in the "scene" they don't get talked about but they're plugging away at their businesses making serious $$.
when was the last time an Australian startup
did anything interesting
Adioso, an Australian Startup, is a YC alumni (2008) - http://www.crunchbase.com/company/adioso
My startup is proudly Australian (and profitable) - http://feedity.com
Edit: What's missing though is investment in technology startups, apart from the plethora of financial systems, the much touted National Broadband Network and a handful of research projects.
As for some other examples there is http://sitepoint.com and http://redbubble.com