Ed Husic (Chifley, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary to the Shadow Treasurer) Share this | Hansard source

We all love a great underdog story. Recently Google recognised six companies for app design at its annual developers' conference in San Francisco. When the winners were read out there was one small firm that edged out some really big names. They beat Evernote, they beat Lyft and they beat BuzzFeed. This small group was honoured as best in class in the Android design section of Google Play. And who was it? It was a four-person team called Shifty Jelly. I would have given them the award just for their name! They came from Adelaide. They made it from Adelaide to the other side of the Pacific, edging out some really big names. They were on a 100-developer short list that was pared back to 18 and then to six. They received the award for seamless browsing in their Pocket Casts app. The app has been downloaded 100,000 times in the Google Play app store. After winning the award, the team's server architect, Philip Simpson, said:

For just a tiny little company in Adelaide, we feel like ‘What are we doing here?

This is not an unknown story insofar as a lot of our start-ups are being recognised in the US because a lot of people over there recognise that our start-ups think global from the start and have a lot of skill to back it up.

But they should not always be the underdog. It should not always be the small firm from one part of the world that just suddenly makes it through a 100-person or a 100-group short list. We have a lot of people. We need more. The focus for us is: how do we get more and more of those companies? We certainly know about the power of start-ups in boosting job productivity and economic growth. We know, based on what we have seen in the States, that for every job created in the tech sector, five others get created. They have job growth that is 25 times faster than other sectors. We know this will create an important source of jobs. It is doing so in the States, and it should do so here when we are under challenge.

So, what are we doing? What are we seeing right now in terms of thinking about smart jobs? And what would we have the government do? I will give you just one simple example. We have seen a decision to de-fund National ICT Australia, or NICTA, from June 2016. CSIRO officials yesterday confirmed at estimates that talks are well progressed on a potential merger between the two organisations. And in a worst-case scenario two-thirds of NICTA's 310 jobs would be gone.

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