Tim Watts (Gellibrand, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Assistant Minister for Communications) Share this | Hansard source

I move:

  That this House:

(1) notes that:

(a) according to a report released last month, Australia's Digital Opportunity, Australia is lagging behind global peers and failing to capture the economic opportunities of the rapidly growing global digital economy;

(b) Australia ranks second last among OECD countries for relative size of our technology sector and its contribution to the economy; and

  (c) the Australian tech sector could create an additional $50 billion per year were Australia successful in catching up and matching the tech sector growth rates of our global peers;

(2) recognises that the Government released 'Australia's Tech Future' which read more like a promotional brochure than serious strategy—it described initiatives already in train, was vague on targets and outcomes—and, importantly, offers no bold vision to drive growth in our digital economy;

(3) further notes that under this Government Australia is suffering from record low wages growth, more than a million Australians underemployed and a per capita recession; and

(4) calls on the Government to urgently take a coordinated approach to the digital economy.

Given half a chance, Australians can compete with the best in the world in any sphere, including the digital economy. Take Eddie, a software package developed in Sydney in the 1990s, which enabled filmmakers to create visual effects at one-10th of the cost of rival products and was used in the Oscar-winning special effects in The Matrix. There was wi-fi, which was a spin-off of CSIRO's radio astronomy research and which has transformed the way we use technology in every office and home in the developed world. More recently there has been the Jira software development package, which has made Atlassian a billion-dollar homegrown tech giant.

Aussies can invent incredible things. They could invent even more if their government backed them in. But the tired, third-term Morrison government has digital economy policy set to autopilot. Despite the slowest economic growth since the global financial crisis, rising unemployment and underemployment, and declining living standards, with a productivity recession underlying it all, this government seems content to allow Australia's digital opportunity to remain unrealised. The best it could do was an underwhelming strategy document, quietly released last Christmas, titled 'Australia's Tech Future'. It was scant on detail and failed to tackle Australia's serious policy challenges around digital regulation and skills shortages. As a result, 12 months on, a recently released report—prepared by the consultancy group AlphaBeta for the Digital Industry Group, an Australian industry association—titled Australia's digital opportunity argues that, if we stay on the same trajectory, Australia will miss out on the tech sector contributing $207 billion to GDP per year by 2030. We need to do better. We can learn from Australian success stories in this endeavour.

To this end, I recently caught up with the House House team in Melbourne, the game studio behind possibly the best thing to happen in 2019 the Untitled Goose Game. This is a game about a horrible goose ruining a lovely morning in a small English village and sold 100,000 copies in the first two weeks after its release in mid-September. It is the latest in a long line of globally successful video games developed by small-team indie developers in Australia. They join the likes of Halfbrick's Fruit Ninja, Hipster Whale's Crossy Road and, my daughter's personal favourite, the Mountains development team's Florence, which won an Apple design award at the 2017 Apple Worldwide Developers Conference.

Video game sales in Australia exceeded $4 billion in 2018, up 25 per cent on the previous year. That's bigger than the film and TV industries in Australia. It's exactly the kind of growing digital economy industry that the government would be backing if it was serious about creating jobs in the growth sectors of our economy. Canada is a great case study about what's possible. Thanks to the support of the Canada Media Fund, their video game industry is one of the biggest in the world—21,000 full-time employees contributing $4.1 billion to the country's economy. The contrast with Australia is stark. Rather than backing this growing industry, upon coming to office the coalition abolished the previous Labor government's $20 million Australian Interactive Games Fund. It also continues to exclude the video game industry from any of the tax concessions available to film and television production in this country.

Labor understands that, if we want to harness the potential of the video game industry, government needs to be actively involved in job creation in this space. That's why Labor is hosting a creative economy summit next year, to hear from creatives like House House about the conditions that enabled their success. House House told me that it wasn't a coincidence that Untitled Goose Game was created in Victoria. There is an existing game design community in Melbourne that traverses universities and the private sector and is located in collaborative workspaces like The Arcade. There is also a state government that's prepared to financially back the sector. A series of Film Victoria grants enabled House House to market their games and to port them to new platforms in order to grow their business at key moments of their development.

The team at House House raised a less obvious point about the role of government in supporting job creation in creative industries, but it is an important point: the need to increase the Newstart allowance. To support the growth of the digital economy, the creatives who are on the vanguard of innovation often need to be able to pay the rent and survive while they take a risk and commercialise their work. House House is a great example of how, when you back Aussie creators in the digital economy, they can compete with the best in the world. Australia needs a government that backs creators like this across the country and that gives them the support they need, when they need it, to take on the best in the world.

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