Culturally, tall poppy syndrome prevents successful people from showing their success, and it is seen as a massive problem to fail. These two things alone make up a pretty chilling force.

You have few good local VCs (though maybe I'm out of the loop), a tiny stock market that doesn't "get" tech and a high cost of living/wage expectation.

At a policy level our economy's geared to property so what money there is goes there, a panel system for government which results in big overseas cos getting a huge edge and general low grade corruption/nepotism which makes the playing field less even.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resource_curse

There is not a great tradition amongst most Australians of trying to "Make it Big.". The Australian dream has been the house on the 1/4 acre block, not making millions in a Silicon Valley style buyout. Add to that the poor regard for those who are seen to be exploiting others for their personal gain and a strong dose of "Tall Poppy Syndrome" where the populous tries to tear down people who seem to be getting too big for their boots and you have a place where American style entrepreneurism is not encouraged.

That said, we tend to celebrate those who step ahead in business, but do it in a way that supports their workers and community.

The train/rail/bus system gets you to beaches and national parks. Even with fairly low grant-funded salaries we can afford to dine out, even though it's fairly expensive, bc we don't have car and other expenses we had in the US.

It's a lot like Canadian living — the comfort kind of lulls you into complacency. We were joking that while US startups optimize for product growth, Aussies optimize for work life balance.

Because of taxes, even if you have a really high salary, you don't end up pocketing THAT much more money, so there's a negative incentive to work really hard. You kind of get punished for it.

And yes, housing is really expensive — my partner and I live in a 1br apartment in the Inner West for AUD$2k/mo, but the costs are comparable to American cities. Everywhere is walkable/bikable though.

The result is that unless you are able to acquire funding, you result to trying to getting something built outside of your job, which is much more difficult to pull off successfully with the limited time available.

So considerably less monetary incentive to 'make it big'. For entrepreneurs who want to do that, why not move to the USA and come back to Australia when you want to settle down and have a family?

The barrier to entry is quite low in Australia, if you earn x you pay y in tax, your accountant will just help you lower y. In France, a simple payslip can't be understood easily, it's like the government is asking you to understand their mess before you can do anything. As a result, all the people I know of in France who start a company complain on the system whereas that's not the case in Australia.

We were once described as the "lucky country" which was used to encapsulate advantages Australia benefited from naturally, like distance from problems elsewhere in the world, great weather and natural resources. The origin of that label was a 1964 book The Lucky Country by Donald Horne where the author points out that:

Australia is a lucky country run mainly by second rate people who share its luck. It lives on other people's ideas, and, although its ordinary people are adaptable, most of its leaders (in all fields) so lack curiosity about the events that surround them that they are often taken by surprise.

Horne observed that Australia "showed less enterprise than almost any other prosperous industrial society."

When I invented the phrase in 1964 to describe Australia, I said: 'Australia is a lucky country run by second rate people who share its luck.' I didn't mean that it had a lot of material resources … I had in mind the idea of Australia as a British derived society whose prosperity in the great age of manufacturing came from the luck of its historical origins … In the lucky style we have never 'earned' our democracy. We simply went along with some British habits.

These quotes hopefully show the underlying Australian attitude through a 1964 lens. All these criticisms are roughly speaking true, though the quality issue is not one of them. Australians can achieve high levels of quality and precision when needed, but it depends on what's 'needed'.

The book The Australian Ugliness by Robin Boyd from 1960, also describes a difficulty in Australians performing economic tasks like Art that are not strictly speaking useful or tasks which have risks outside the normal business mode.

Most Australians decline to recognize the patronage in the British and American attitude in such enterprises as Vogue Australia or the Holden car, and do not wish to be reminded of the facts that their country is still known abroad as an artistic and intellectual desert, and that they themselves would never be taken seriously without their denying to some extent their Australian upbringing and background, and that highly talented Australians in any of the non-useful fields of art or science have to face a dramatic decision early in their careers. They can stay here in easy-going comfort with their talent and their frustrations both working at half pressure, or they may wrench themselves from their own country in order to develop themselves.

The necessity to leave Australia to achieve "full pressure" artistic or talented work, is the most important part of his criticism.

Passionate, heart felt, anger and fear driven action you can see in the Americas, does not result in economic activity over here in the same way. Passion and "whims" are more likely to guide an Aussie into the desert, loose and lost in impotent landscape that cannot form a feedback loop to success.

There are no Great Plains to manifest destiny across. From day one of the First Fleet landing in Australia, creating a survivable colony was a hard won enterprise where getting the basics like agriculture and resources in place was filled with setback and difficultly every step of the way. The interior land may be full of mineral resources, but sustainable living areas are far fewer than needed to support flights of fancy. So we stick to rivers and lakes on the coast. A naturalistic instinct for sticking to peaceful relationships and useful business has stuck in the heart.

The kind of passionate, determined, self-motivated desire for risk taking you see in the USA for nearly any idea you can dream up, is difficult to pull off in Australia. You can't burn relationships here at the cost of a fanciful dream. You can't demand everybody serve your passion in an instant. The economy in Aus is setup to keep the useful businesses going. High-energy, fast-paced startups that need some novel and specific item delivered yesterday, or thousands of man-hours of overtime demanded in the moment to solve a novel problem, is going to struggle badly. The government's stability, centralization and influence over the culture, causes an attitude of wait-and-validate to novel problems and otherwise sticking to tried and true conventions.

The USA has a massive advantage in startups over the rest of the world, it can run them like an economic war. Australian startups are more frequently nurtured into existence, if at all, and have a more narrow window of actionable appeal to locals.

If you want to innovate you have to go overseas, as can be seen with the international Aussie successes and all the local small startups that make it big when bought out by American companies or move operations overseas. If you want to re-implement a tried and true idea into a solid and safe business, you do it in Australia.