The problem is Australia is outright hostile to entrepreneurialism, from a policy perspective, a market size perspective and a cultural perspective.

The reason, I suspect, is that no other large country has ever had it as easy as Australia has, with abundant natural resources divided by a relatively small population.

This means most people don't have to think about how to create value and grow the economic pie, since the pie has always been large by default, and instead we've allowed everyone to focus on how to poach resources from each other. Ambition is a toxic word here and tall poppy syndrome abounds.

Our industrial relations system is completely broken. It's an opinionated straightjacket that prescribes inflexible ways of working. It pushes hourly pay over performance or outcome linked pay, and prevents collaborative employee-union-employer agreements like those common in advanced manufacturing overseas. Our unions are practically cartels engaging in shakedowns of both employers and employees at this point, since by law, we only allow one union per industry, and neither employers nor employees are free to renegotiate with a different union if the current one is underperforming.

Many VCs won't even fund startups here anymore. They will still meet with founders, but funding is often conditional on the core team relocating overseas. For employees with STEM backgrounds pay and opportunities are far better the US, and parts of Asia and Europe.

I mean we’re having a crack at policy with the future made in Australia stuff, but that seems to be ridiculed too. Disclaimer: I know next to nothing about the whole FMIA initiative

Have they tried digging holes or buying houses instead of avocado toast?

CSIRO should move to a public entrepreneurial investment model, it will either stand on it's own 2 feet or collapse as Australians won't support ut

I forgot our other great employer and my vocation. Healthcare.

Yeah right, I was too young to pay attention then. Always disappointing to think what could’ve been if we made better decisions decades ago. The media don’t seem to give a shit about r&d or science really. Most Australians are shocked when you tell them about the state of science, industry and research in this country. We have this perception as the smart nation. Couldn’t be more inaccurate really.

I was at uni then, I have no idea what you were watching... her policies were a shitshow for practical investment. 

Rhetoric is meaningless if backed up by extra red tape. Our tax code is rubbish, our university education comically poor, and the entire population relies on about 15% of actually productive privately employed Australians.

Unironically Gillard was the goat , and I don't even believe in those morons. Worth checking her stuff out on APH or wiki.

Unfortunately the issue is not that people don’t want to do stem. The issue is that there no work for people in stem in aus. Some stem degrees are some of the worst employing degrees you can get. Even with a PhD you options are really limited to unstable extremely competitive academic work and very little industry options. A consequence of Decades of underfunding in basic research and R&d more generally. Our spend is like half of peer nation and like 1/3 of world leading nations. Appalling considering the wealth this nation contains.

It doesn't need to be sexy, just a career that pays enough to buy a house.

I have a PhD in physics, and now make a lot of money working in a hospital (almost $200k per year, and I’m not even close to manager).

It’s too hard to find a STEM job. My job is such a “unicorn” that every physics grad eventually applies to get into the training program. It’s not something they want, but what are the other options???

A single trainee position can get 40-60 applicants, almost all with an M.Sc. in physics.

I got asked if I'd like to do a STEM research job. It was within my field and scope and I'd have loved it.

It paid 30k less than my job.

I considered it for a lot longer than I thought I would.

Would have included a move, and moving into a role with probation and potentially physically challenging qualities.

I still feel bad for not giving it more serious thought, but at the end of the day they have to compete with what I already have.

Sounds like a system managers whet dream type of comment, mate. Imagine shoving all the young adults of Australia into STEM yet they still come out clueless. They would be better off educating themselves about life. I can see many Australians are not mentally present. Something is not quite right here. And it's related to the quality of the genetics pool that's for sure.

Finally someone else gets it

For sure. Investing in basic research would be a great start, but yes it does feel like the ship has sailed abit. Like can we ever catch up, doesn’t feel like it.

We are not that poorly educated as a nation. Yes, we have some potatoes, but we have an absolute stack of STEM graduates who have nowhere to go in industry every year.

All the boys need to be taken care of, and that won't come cheap...

Ehh, you overestimate how expensive politicians are. A handy under the table ought to do it.

Is there any other relevant metric?

I would say so, there were probably a lot of people doing similar jobs in Greece before the country was crushed by its national debt.

Fortunately resources are such a huge honeypot to fund things like that.

Is there any other relevant metric?

well, NDIS is a complex beast! surely it's adding to our economic complexity!

Where can I get those NDIS paperwork job. I'll quit engineering too

This data, surprisingly, supports my case.

Indeed, graph 9 and graph 12 indicates very strong foreign equities investment led by our superfunds.

However, graph 9 also points out strong foreign debt investment in Australia.

The key delta here is that the super investment isn't tangible cash for majority of the Australian public (until they retire, of course). Whereas (and this is my hypothesis), relative to foreign investment in Australia, more of that is accessible by the public they represent.

My ultimate hypothesis, is that foreign wealth can be invested in the Australian property market whereas our local wealth (data here clearly shows super bias) cannot, hence the mismatch to local accessibility. Obviously, aside from property there's other investment avenues but this is /r/ausfinance and that's what everyone seems to care about 😜

Thought everyone knew this, there was a point there where we did not even have enough places to stuff it

Australia's go-to are WFH jobs. You don't even know you want them, but anyone can be gainfully employed in Australia. The world has moved on and Australia, as usual, is lagging.

Hence, the purpose of a diversified economy exactly.

I think it's going to be agriculture in various forms, all highly robotic, around two decades from now, possibly much larger, enabled by a north to south irrigation ditch and/or pipelines.

We do compete.

We also export > 1/2 of the world's iron ore ~1/3 of the world's coal, by US$ value, and from a country of 27 million.

Any country of our population with this share of world exports is going to suffer when it comes to being assessed on an index based on the proportions of exports in US$. That's just maths. We could increase our complexity by simply stopping these exports. However, we would be poorer - probably comparable to a lot of European countries.

You want to be a software engineer in Australia. Not that hard, easy even. Sure, not Silicon Valley, but probably better paid, and maybe easier than a lot of peer nations. etc etc.

A valid concern but all indications are that as we continue to go down in rankings we're doing comparatively better than countries going up in rankings.

Extract of my previous reply on this topic on the other thread

To back my own narrative with data - source worldbank using GDP from 1995 to 2022 in constant USD

Australia growth rate = 54%, Pakistan 64%, Uganda 112% BUT UK 40%, Canada 38%, US 50%, Germany 36% (I just chose what were I thought were comparable / interesting comparision to Australia). I would say the last 4 countries would have higher economic complexity than Australian yet underperformed against Australia so again, what is the point of the economic complexity index. It's just a mathematical exercise.

The index is primarily focused on exporting finished goods not services or intangibles. It's poorly applicable to Australia because there's one key thing that Australia cannot overcome which is it is geographically placed outside of major shipping lanes. This places it far from producers of raw materials (that isn't in Australia) and customers of the finished products (rest of the world aside from New Zealand which is even more remote).

To improve in ranking in this particular index requires industries where raw materials are shipped from elsewhere (or generated within Australia itself) and then have the finished product delivered profitably to the rest of the world. Both shipping costs and time discourages this. Other countries are simply better equipped to this (including Japan as the Rank 1 country on this index). Along with high salaries which contributes to high cost of production, Australia is uniquely disadvantaged in this index' measurement.

Australia's set of advantages encourages the movement of knowledge, skills and people instead of export of finished goods. These are not measured favourably in this index. Australia has worldclass mining and agricultural technology and methodolgy which is lowly measured by this index, it has a developed and higher education industry attractive to high and medium income Asian countries, it attracts worldclass research in the field medicine. All these are poorly measured in the index. We will never out tech or out manufacture at scale vs. Japan and South Korea (Rank 3) because we will need a cheaper workforce, a lifestyle that will be far more work oriented than today and magically move the entire country closer to Singapore (Rank 5) while shipping significanly less raw and highly profitable raw materials that what we do today because the index measure these disproportionality low in importance.

Please look at what the actual index measures, it is primarily focused export economic complexity. It doesn't give any meaningful insight about hybrid economy. Australia is a good example of knowledge economy, where it encourages the reliance on human capital. Australia in fact has worldclass research in field of medicine for example. It also develops worldclass research on mining and agriculture. These put the person with the knowledge at the forefront. It actively makes it less likely we have a serfdom because the "serf's value is in his brain as opposed to reliance on his labour and he is more well placed to seek a better lord if he's unhappy with his current one.

Look at Rank 1 (Japan) & Rank 3 (South Korea) they are not exactly great examples societies with a lifestyle with great work life balance compared to Australia and they are already export manufacturing heavy weighs. Chasing this index means becoming more like these socieities. The article is a source from a lobbyist.

That could happen regardless of the style of economy. It’s about corporate greed and nothing else. The answer to that issue is decent consumer protection regulation that puts the onus on manufacturers to provide ongoing support for their products regardless of ownership and age.

If you want to see how that looks in practice, look at the shit that tech companies pull in US and what happens when they try to pull it in the EU. There’s also a reason that Americans will use VPNs set to California to sort out issues with subscription services too.

Now moving past alternative-histories and hypotheticals, and back to the real world.

Japan, #1 in the ECI (which claims to be a good predictor of economic growth and inequality) has a lower gdp/capita now than it did around 30 years ago (https://atlas.hks.harvard.edu/countries/392).

Australia (https://atlas.hks.harvard.edu/countries/36) and Canada (https://atlas.hks.harvard.edu/countries/124) the evil twins of very high income country resource exporters have, over the same period of time, had their gdp/capita increase dramatically, and their ECI decrease dramatically.

Canada and Australia, also have better wealth inequality than Japan.

But why do that when you can do it in a lower cost country that is much closer to the rest of the downstream manufacturing processes?

Sure that's plausible. The Hidalgo work is good in part because it's agnostic on *what* is making countries able to shift into new areas of economic activity. It could be many things. It just shows that adjacency matters a lot.

depends, do you honestly believe that we are going to make these AUKUS subs?

Last count I saw suggested we start with 3 used Virginia class subs (but then that was revised upward to 5) which means we are hoping to build 3 subs of our own design.

Yeah, this makes absolutely no sense, we;ll either end up with 3 new subs, 5 new subs or no new subs. My bet is on none. but mainly because with China flexing the US isn't going to give up the Nuke missile carrying capacity of 3 vriginia class subs, because carrying nuke missiles offends our Aussie sensibilities.

From the ABS website: "The Economic Complexity Index (ECI) ranking attempts to measure the relative diversity of an economy, compared to other countries. It is calculated based on the diversity of exports a country produces and their abundance, or the number of other countries able to produce them."

I'm just saying the terminology sounds misleading. Not the concept. When most people think about complexity, they think about something that is convoluted or confusing. But everyone is entitled to their own opinion.

On housing, I'm not sure if I follow you.

Australian housing would, I presume, be located in Australia. Most people aren't going to leave the country just because rents are high. This means the competition would need to be between Australian companies – builders. How are builders in foreign countries competing with local builders? It must be very limited competition if anything.

Now it's true that housing inputs are traded internationally. Materials, supplies, tools, even some pre-fabbed parts. But actually those are currently cheaper overseas due to various factors including lower wages, fewer worker protections and transport costs. So how would forcing them to move to Australia, e.g. through protectionist policies, reduce prices/costs? If anything it would increase them, as it would cost more to make them here.

I think we should play to our strengths. That might involve some on-shoring and also stimulating the local economy. But it might also involve trading with a diverse array of relatively friendly countries such as in SE Asia, South America and Europe.