Queensland could soon add a rocket range to the list of tourist attractions in the iconic Whitsunday region with Gilmour Space Technologies getting state government support for a launch facility at Abbot Point.
Queensland deputy premier and Minister for State Development Steven Miles said the government was committed to the development of a launch infrastructure in the state and has given Gilmour Space the green light to proceed with its development application for a small rocket launch pad at the Abbot Point State Development Area.
The announcement follows a technical and environmental investigation into the potential of Abbot Point as a suitable location for small-scale launch vehicles had come back positive and Gilmour Space had expressed an interest in the site, Mr Miles said.
Queensland had a number of home-grown advantages as a central location for the Australian space industry and the state is investigating a strategy that would include multiple launch facilities.
Whitsunday looms: Gilmour Space gets state government backing for a launch facility
“Growing our space industry in Queensland will add billions to the economy and create thousands of local jobs. That’s why we are committed the development of launch infrastructure,” Mr Miles said.
“Our easterly facing position, proximity to the equator, and our leading launch and propulsion companies make Queensland the perfect place to invest in space,” he said.
The state’s strategic defence advisor for aerospace, former Air Vice-Marshal Neil Hart, said launch facilities were one of the foundational elements of developing a true sovereign capability.
“There is considerable interest in leveraging the geographic advantage of an East coast launch from low latitudes,” Mr Hart said.
“Identifying a site along the Queensland coast with the potential to launch multiple and large payloads to a range of nationally significant orbits would be a significant contribution to Australia’s growing space capabilities.”
Gilmour Space co-founder and head of launch operations James Gilmour said the Abbot Point site would give the company’s customers access to “a range of valuable orbits, inclinations, and altitudes that they will require.”
The company is also exploring a proposed launch site in South Australia for complementary polar orbits, in line with Gilmour’s ‘All Orbits, All Planets’ corporate vision for Gilmour Space.
The deputy premier said in addition to this ongoing work, the next actions of our strategy will be underway, including working with the space industry to support the development of a rocket engine test site and an Earth observation data analytics hub.
“These projects align with Queensland’s strengths, will boost our economic recovery and will help ensure the growth of our space industry is all systems go,” Mr Miles said.
For Whitsunday Regional Council Mayor Andrew Willcox, developing a launch site at Abbott Point would deliver a huge economic boost for the region and create hundreds of permanent job opportunities for Bowen and Whitsunday residents.
“For too long Bowen has been the next “boom town” in north Queensland so adding a space launch site to our expanding agriculture, mining and tourism sectors will be a game-changer for our region.
One year after the flagship NSW Government delivery site at Service NSW was breached, the state has unveiled a cybersecurity strategy that puts industry development and capability-building in cyber at the centre of government tech policy.
The sector-wide cybersecurity strategy is an acknowledgment of the importance of bringing together industry policy in relation to cyber with government resilience in relation to cyber.
The thinking is that a focus on building a strong local cyber industry inevitably leads to improved cyber skills, cyber capability and ultimately the resiliency of cyber infrastructure – including in government.
The strategy is focused on four key commitment including improved state government cyber resilience, industry assistance to help NSW cyber businesses to grow, uplifting the cyber security workforce and skills, and supporting cyber research and innovation.
Bright lights, cyber city: NSW has unveiled an industry-centric cyber strategy
NSW Digital Minister Victor Dominello claimed NSW was already leading the nation in the cybersecurity sector. Improving cyber resilience across the economy required the involvement of all sectors – citizens, businesses, government, and researchers. But government needed to lead.
“Increasing overall cybersecurity resilience is about ensuring the safety and security of citizens and communities online. Government is absolutely pivotal to this as part of its overall responsibility to protect its citizens,” Mr Dominello said.
“In a post COVID-19 environment, we need to adapt our way of living and working to embrace the digital future,” he said.
“Our post COVID-19 ‘new normal’ will bring incredible opportunities as we adapt to greater reliance on connectivity, remote working and importance of data.
“It is important that the NSW Government maximizes the state’s existing capabilities and develops the local cybersecurity industry into a globally competitive, innovative ecosystem that drives economic growth.”
The NSW government has spent the last year working through its cybersecurity structures following a breach at Service NSW.
A parliamentary inquiry into the breach released earlier this year recommended an overhaul of cyber practices – including the strengthening of the mandate and resources of Cybersecurity NSW, and moving the agency from the Department of Customer Service to Premier and Cabinet.
NSW is also set to become the first Australian state or territory to introduce a mandatory data breach notification scheme, following a serious cyber incident last year.
But it is the recognition of the direct link between the strength of the local cyber industry and overall cyber resilience across the economy – including government – that is most interesting about this strategy. And the industry development initiatives recognise that link.
NSW Jobs and Investment Minister Stuart Ayres said the state would partner with the cyber sector to grow the local industry, leverage academic strengths, and to drive international competitiveness.
“Under this strategy, Investment NSW will establish a NSW Cyber Hub, delivering a range of initiatives to accelerate the growth of NSW cyber businesses, maintain and attract the right talent to create the fluid, dynamic workforce needed to address skills gaps,” Mr Ayres said.
“NSW already has an incredible depth of talent however we need to continue to foster, cultivate and grow this pipeline to ensure our industry thrives. This strategy builds on our strengths whilst seeking to grow new ones and will help the NSW digital economy thrive.”
“The export opportunities for cybersecurity industry is enormous. From Bondi to Broken Hill, cybersecurity businesses can export to any location around the world from any city or town in NSW.”
The public consultation and industry engagement finished in late 2020. The new strategy replaces the existing NSW Cyber Security Strategy and the NSW Cyber Industry Development Strategy, combining both into one overarching cyber security strategy.
When Industry Minister Christian Porter rose in question time to mock the Opposition for “reheating” a policy from six years ago, it’s unclear whether he knew the government had done exactly the same thing just days earlier.
Yes, Labor had ‘re-adopted’ an innovation-focused policy it announced in late 2015 and took to the federal election the following year.
Whether the Opposition having the same policy five years ago when it was also the Opposition is an issue at all is also very much up for debate. But it’s also a fact that in last week’s budget the government re-adopted an innovation-focused policy that it announced in late 2015 but failed to pass into law.
Hours after Labor leader Anthony Albanese and Industry spokesman Ed Husic unveiled plans for a ‘Startup Year’, where graduates would be able to access HELP loans to participate in business accelerator programs, it emerged in the media that this was the same policy that Labor took to the 2016 election.
Policy balloon: There’s a pot calling the kettle black in Canberra
This wasn’t exactly a secret, with a press release from Opposition Leader at the time Bill Shorten easily found with a quick Google search.
But the government quickly jumped on this revelation, with Mr Porter in Parliament branding the reuse of the policy as demonstrating a “lack of innovation”.
His criticism focused on the fact the Opposition had used the same name for its same policy.
“They weren’t even innovative enough in a six-year period to come up with a new name for an old policy. Literally, the best that the Leader of the Opposition can do in the space of innovation is to plagiarise a six-year-old idea of his predecessor,” Mr Porter said.
The government’s attacks were nothing more than a hypocritical attempt at points scoring that dodged any real discussion of policy and efforts to improve Australia’s innovation output.
The government’s critiques failed to mention that Mr Husic was also instrumental in the development of the “Startup Year” policy in 2015 as a shadow Innovation minister. And it’s a hard argument to make that a party can steal its own policy that it has been unable to implement because it has not won government in the time since.
Mr Porter also neglected to mention that the government had also reheated its own policy from more than five years ago in the federal budget.
Included in then-Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull’s National Innovation and Science Agenda was a policy that would allow for the self-assessment of the depreciation of intangible assets, something which the government said would foster innovation in Australian businesses and encourage the adoption of new technologies.
But the Coalition was unable to get the policy past Parliament and eventually dropped it in 2018.
More than five years after first announcing the policy, the Coalition ‘unveiled’ it again as part of the $1.2 billion Digital Economy Strategy in last week’s budget. The policy is exactly the same as the one promoted by the former Turnbull Government.
While Labor’s policy didn’t see the light of day because the party lost the election in the following year, the Coalition were unable to pass its reforms and eventually dumped them in 2018, claiming savings of more than $400 million.
While it’s not inherently bad for either party to return to their previous policies, it’s disingenuous and hypocritical of the government to be going on the attack against Labor for doing this when it did the very same thing just days earlier.
The Morrison Government has announced a $1.2 billion package as part of the 2021-22 budget under the strapline ‘Digital Economy Strategy – Delivering a modern and digital economy to drive Australia’s future prosperity.’ This is too little, too late.
The Federal Budget has become a stylised dance. In the lead-up to budget night, journalists will repeatedly ask the Treasurer questions about the content of the budget to which the well-worn answer is that the journalist will have to wait until budget night.
Unless, of course, the government thinks there is a positive announcement that will get lost in the headlines about deficits, debt, and tax rates. So it has been with the (latest) Digital Economy Strategy, clearly provided to the media embargoed till midnight on Wednesday of last week(so online stories started appearing early on Thursday).
The PM and Ministers then fronted the obligatory press conference at a business that was deemed to be relevant to the announcement. On the day of the announcement the government supplied a nice video from Minister Senator Jane Hume and the Strategy on a Page.
Digital Economy: It been a long road to progress
The other benefit of the pre-budget media drop is that the announcement avoids the detailed scrutiny of the budget lock-up. This ‘strategy’ really needs that scrutiny.
According to Forbes, the term ‘Digital Economy’ was coined by Don Tapscott. The preface to his 1995 book The Digital Economy: Promise and Peril in the Age of Networked Intelligence began:
Today we are witnessing the early, turbulent days of a revolution as significant as any other in human history. A new medium of human communications is emerging, one that my prove to surpass all previous revolutions – the printing press, the telephone, the television – in its impact on our economic and social life. The computer is expanding from a tool for information management to a tool for communications. The Internet (Net) and World Wide Web (Web) are enabling a new economy based on the networking of human intelligence. In this digital economy, individuals and enterprises create wealth by applying knowledge, networked human intelligence, and effort to manufacturing, agriculture and services.
Tapscott was writing at the period of time when the Web component of the Net was just becoming established through early browsers, and commercial Internet services were just emerging, especially in Australia.
The term came to prominence in Australia when in 2007 Prime Minister Kevin Rudd appointed Senator Stephen Conroy as the Minister for Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy. Progress from then on was shaky.
Rudd’s Australia 2020 forum originally included a workstream of ‘Economic infrastructure, the digital economy and the future of our cities’ but this was deleted when the final committees were announced. More formally the Rudd Government first released Australia’s Digital Economy: Future Directions in July 2009, and #au20: National Digital Economy Strategy in May 2011.
Partially in keeping with Tapscott’s work, these two documents defined the ‘digital economy’ as ‘the global network of economic and social activities that are enabled by information and communications technologies, such as the internet, mobile and sensor networks.’
The form of the words though is a little like describing the Industrial economy as what happens in factories, rather than the transformation of the economy through the application of machines. What Tapscott was describing wasn’t a new part of the economy, but a new economy.
Personal experience was that the bureaucracy at least didn’t understand this to be about transformation of the entire economy.
Intriguingly the strategy was released after the budget that year, resulting in a somewhat scathing column by me about the inadequate budget response on the digital economy. However, when released the strategy was itself a little disappointing,
The focus of the strategy was given away by the strapline ‘Leveraging the National Broadband Network to drive Australia’s Digital Productivity.’ And the underlying ambition was expressed as the (unmeasurable and imprecise) goal ‘that by 2020, Australia will be among the world’s leading digital economies.’ This flavour that the strategy leveraged the NBN has, as we will see, bedevilled strategy since.
Nonetheless this first strategy introduced eight ‘digital economy goals’ covering:
online participation by Australian households
online engagement by Australian businesses and not-for-profit organisations
smart management of our environment and infrastructure
improved health and aged care
expanded online education
increased teleworking
improved online government service delivery and engagement
greater digital engagement in regional Australia.
Conroy’s second attempt Advancing Australia as a Digital Economy made significant improvement, adding seven enablers that included trusted online identities and encouraging open data.
The strategy was now included a comprehensive list of initiatives that were progressing the goals. All these trial initiatives were completed after the change of Government in 2013 and to the author’s knowledge, none of the evaluation reports have ever been released.
Across both plans the centrality of increased teleworking, expanded online education and telehealth and improved aged care make fascinating reading in the light of the COVID19 pandemic.
While debate raged over whether Australia would have fared better in the pandemic under Labor’s all-fibre plan or whether the shift to the Multi-Technology Mix had been essential to get the roll-out complete in time, what is indisputable was that the country was not ready for widescale teleworking, telehealth and online education. (And on the vexed question of roll-out, the record shows that the 2013 NBN Strategic Review was seriously flawed as it overestimated both the cost and time the original build would require).
Over the course of 2011-12 the ALP faced increasing pressure to justify the need for the higher speeds of broadband that only fibre could deliver. This resulted in Senator Conroy wanting to bias the digital economy projects to those that required the full 100 Mbps.
Yet both 2011 and 2013 documents focus on justifying Labor’s mismanaged, costly, delayed NBN by framing it as a pre-requisite for global digital greatness.
The policy went on to note that ‘Many of the aspirations contained in the updated NDES are outside the scope of this policy because they fall under other portfolios.’ Included as an example was ‘expanding the Medicare Benefits Schedule to include remotely delivered services.’
In the pandemic we had Health rapidly putting in place a Medicare-funded telehealth process, which has just been extended. Minister Hunt has also announced that ‘The Government continues to work with peak bodies to co-design permanent post-pandemic Telehealth as part of broader primary care reforms to modernise Medicare and provide flexibility of access to primary and allied healthcare services.’
How much better would our society and economy have coped with the pandemic if there had been continual development of telehealth (and telework and online learning) over the last seven and a half years?
The Coalition’s 2013 policy promised:
If elected, the Coalition will update the NDES during its first term of government. Such an update will include a greater focus on presenting an integrated view across the different tiers of government, much greater input from the States and Territories, a focus on ensuring digital policies and programs at national and State or Territory level complement rather than duplicate each other and a much clearer commitment to leveraging public sector ICT to lead by example.
Despite the editor’s scepticism in a column in March 2016, the promised update was published in May 2016. The update repeated the theme of the policy by stating ‘While the digitisation of the Australian economy is primarily market-led, the government understands that it has an important role in creating the policy framework that promotes the growth of the increasingly digital economy.’ Otherwise, it fell way short of the policy promise, identifying only six activities:
Investing in affordable and ubiquitous high-speed broadband.
Acting as an exemplar by digitising government services and opening government data sets.
Investing in science and research and promoting innovation.
Enabling Australians to protect themselves so they can go online securely and safely.
Engaging internationally to harness global opportunities.
Flexible regulatory frameworks.
None of the promise of ‘an integrated view across the different tiers of government’ appeared.
The Coalition Government’s next effort was Australia’s Tech Future in December 2018. This document recognised that ‘The opportunities afforded by digital technologies are not constrained to technology-based companies and start-ups – they can add value across all parts of the economy.’ It had elements of a strategy by identifying actions that were required across skills, inclusion, digital government, digital infrastructure, data, security and regulation. But rather than being a commitment to new action to accelerate the use of digital technologies, it was more a stocktake of things already occurring.
The latest strategy has many of the same elements as the Coalition government’s earlier efforts. The first group of activities under the heading ‘Right foundations to grow the Digital Economy’ is the familiar catalogue of infrastructure, safety and security, skills and regulation.
The second group, ‘Building capabilities in emerging technologies’, is a grab-bag of sexy tech – AI, IoT, Data Analytics, Blockchain and Quantum Computing. These occupy the space that the cloud occupied in earlier strategies.
The final grouping is ‘Lifting our ambition – Digital Growth Priorities’ which is the typical get business online, digital technologies in existing sectors and digital government and services.
The ultimate failure of a decade of digital economy strategizing is the overarching vision of the strategy; ‘For Australia to be a leading digital economy and society by 2030.’ Recall that the 2011 goal was ‘that by 2020, Australia will be among the world’s leading digital economies’ and you are left wondering what happened in the intervening decade.
There are two reasons for this. The first is that the politics of the NBN spilled over into digital economy strategy – the strategy was shaped by conceptions of the technological requirement of digital infrastructure. But far deeper than this are the three ideological prohibitions on the Coalition developing and executing meaningful strategy.
The first is that solutions to economic and social challenges should be found in markets not government.
The second is a belief that state and territory governments are responsible for ‘service delivery’ even in cases such as health where the funding comes directly from the central government.
The third is that the Coalition is fundamentally conservative, that is, it has an ideological predisposition against change.
Footnote: David Havyatt worked in the office of Senator Stephen Conroy from December 2011 till the Minister resigned his portfolio in June 2013. He was an unsuccessful candidate for the position of Assistant Secretary heading the Digital Economy Branch in 2008. In the debrief after that application a Department official said as a candidate he had talked about the digital economy being transformative whereas all the government wanted was to get businesses online.
Ada Lovelace, the daughter of poet Lord Byron and collaborator with mechanical computer pioneer Charles Babbage, is credited with being the world’s first computer programmer.
Lawyer and writer Lizzie O’Shea thinks Lovelace has lessons for us today about we deal with digital technology, along with Tom Paine and the Paris Commune, neither of which have any connection with computers, or with digital technology.
She has written a book setting out her arguments: Future Histories. What Ada Lovelace, Tom Paine, and the Paris Commune Teach Us about Digital Technology. She says we need to stop trying to look forward and instead look backward if we are to prepare for our digital future. She explained her thinking in conversation with Carmel Lee, a barrister at Greenway Chambers, in a webinar hosted by the Australian Society for Computer and the Law (AUSCL) and emceed by AUSCL National Convenor and NSW President, Marina Yastreboff.
What does a democracy sausage look like in the digital realm
Ms O’Shea said she was moved to write the book because “it felt like we were in an age saturated in pessimism, in which phenomena like climate change threaten the lives of millions of people, inequality grows unchecked, and right-wing populism peddles fear and bigotry,” and when “appetite for radical social transformation to address these trends is often lacking.”
Digital technology, she argues, could support human ingenuity and cooperation to overcome some of the most profound challenges we face, but we are not making effective use of it to these ends.
“The tech we have is not the tech we want. It’s the tech of the wealthy, of billionaires rather than billions. … We are not making use of the potential of the digital revolution. But it’s within our grasp to change that.”
She hope the book will connect technologists with activists, makers and critical thinkers, “to help us define a collective future in the digital revolution that is more democratic.”
The book, she says, is designed to serve two audiences. “It provides an introduction to some of the key debates generated by the development of digital technology for those who have perhaps been hesitant, or even reluctant, to meaningfully engage with these topics. And it provides an introduction to some political traditions for those who perhaps are already immersed in the world of technology.”
She explains: “If you have ideas about history, then you probably have ideas about how technology should be organised and developed. And equally, if you have thoughts about technology, you might find that your criticisms of it have precedent in our past that are both rich and inspiring.”
Ms O’Shea is also a founder and the chair of Digital Rights Watch, formed in 2016 to combat the erosion of human rights in the online environment. She says society needs to question, and block if necessary, technologies such as face recognition that threaten human rights and the vulnerable. Face recognition is now widely deployed in major cities around the world, and reportedly is being used in Russia to identify and track down demonstrators supporting Alexei Navalny.
“The last few years have shown that the cracks in the digital revolution are emerging,” Ms O’Shea says. “It’s shed light on the problems that it has created. And our job is to use that light to navigate towards a more democratic digital tomorrow.”
To this end she invokes as an example the Paris Commune, which flourished for six years immediately after the storming of the Bastille in 1789.
“Some of the things they were talking about were so revolutionary, even by modern terms. … They applied a bottom-up approach to basic things like how to make decisions about when people would work. They cancelled night-time work in Paris. They abolished rents for a period. They had collective organisations that determined what kind of artwork would be on display.
“When you start to experiment with these bottom-up ideas you can see aspects of daily life that might be shaped differently, if we gave people the opportunity to have a say.”
The Internet is now a tool that enables, for good or ill, anyone and everyone to ‘have a say’, and Ms O’Shea thinks it should be better exploited to enable greater participation by individuals in public life.
With the book, she says, “I wanted to revive alternative ways of deciding what’s possible, and what’s good about society, and how deciding which direction we take can be returned to people and using the capacity of network technology to do that.”
InnovationAus.com is a media partner of the Australian Society for Computers and the Law.
The Morrison government’s second pandemic budget contained plenty of red meat for the tech industry through its $1.2 billion digital economy strategy initiatives. But despite this focus, the Digital Transformation Agency will see its budget and staffing levels substantially reduced.
Total resourcing for the Digital Transformation Agency (DTA) will reduce by about $90 million next financial year, from $425.5 million to $336 million. The average staff numbers will drop from 255 this financial year to 227 staff in 2021-22.
The reduced resourcing for the DTA came even as Mr Frydenberg made digital services and digital industry development themes a central component of his budget narrative, more so than perhaps any previous treasurer.
It also comes just weeks after the DTA was moved from Services Australia to the Department of Prime Minister & Cabinet.
Transformer: A big focus on on digital, but DTA gets a cut
The budget’s digital economy strategy included a grab-bag of government service delivery funding initiatives, new money for projects aimed at extracting value from government data assets, as well as significant new investment in digital skills programs, cyber initiatives, and digital infrastructure.
“Digital infrastructure and digital skills will be critical for the competitiveness of our economy, creating massive opportunities for growth and jobs,” Mr Frydenberg told the Parliament in his Budget address.
The Budget allocated more than $200 million over two years from 2021-22 to the redevelopment of the myGov platform, a project that has been known as GovDXP and is designed to provide a more personalised services tailored to individual citizens. The funding includes a $54 million allocation of capital funding.
The GovDXP project has so far been built out to phase one beta product through a series of outsourced supplier contracts to consulting giant Deloitte at a cost of more than $30 million.
Some $421.6 million over two years from 2021-22 – including $38.7 million in capital funding – has been allocated to the ongoing development work on the My Health Record and for funding for the Australian Digital Heath Agency.
These two major funding allocations follow $250 million in new funding given for the whole of government Digital ID program in the budget last October.
The DTA has been given an additional $10 million to “support the delivery of the government’s digital transformation priorities” while an additional $3.2 million extends the Digital Technology Taskforce’s funding until the end of June next year to support the implementation of the digital economy strategy.
The budget papers also reaffirm the government’s commitment to building a standardised back-end technology platform across government. The cost of the huge project is not known, classified in the budget documentation as “not for publication” – or nfp – due to commercial sensitivities.
“The government will provide funding over two years from 2021-22 to Services Australia to build and delivery modernised government technology for managing accounts, resources and workforce (GovERP), and the Department of Finance by the Service Delivery Officer and its 14 client organisations as the first implementation,” the Budget papers said.
“The government has committed to continuing to transform the operation of the Australian Public Service by consolidating and standardising the delivery of corporate services through the GovERP technologies.
“GovERP will provide a common digital backbone that allows the APS to rapidly collaborate, share and analyse data.
“Funding will also be provided in 2021-22 to develop the second pass business cases for the further adoption of GovERP including suitable standardised technologies for small and medium-sized agencies.
“The funding for this measure is not for publication (nfp) due to commercial sensitivities.”
Extracting value from data across the economy is a major theme of the government’s digital economy strategy.
It includes $111.3 million over two years from 2021-22 – including $35 million in capital funding – to continue the roll-out of the Consumer Data Right in the banking sector and to accelerate its roll-out into other parts of the economy, including the energy and telecommunications sector.
The budget allocates $40.2 million over four years from July to improve the government’s location-based data infrastructure through the creation of a three-dimensional “Data Atlas” of Australia’s geography to support business investment, environmental management and national disaster responses.
It has set aside $16.5 million to identify government data assets and to create a searchable data catalogue. The Australian government also plans to work with state and territory governments – in consultation with the private sector – to develop an Australian Data Strategy 2021-25 to be funded out of the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet.
Among the initiatives unveiled as pre-budget drops to media and affirmed in the budget papers was the $53 million over four years to create a National AI Centre, and four AI and Digital Capability hubs to support SME to adopt artificial intelligence technologies.
Government has also allocated $33.7 million over four years to provide grants to businesses to work with government to develop AI solutions “to solve national challenges”, while $24.7 million over six years will fund a Next Generation AI Graduates Program to attract AI specialists through national scholarships.
Treasurer Josh Frydenberg has rightly connected the government’s big investment into its digital economy strategy to its program of economic recovery. But it is a lost opportunity if the government does not also mandate minimum participation levels for local technology companies in its tech procurement program.
The 2021-22 federal budget allocated half-a-billion dollars in spending on big-ticket digital delivery projects, including $200 million over two years for the myGov redevelopment, and more than $420 million to continue the My Health Record system and to fund the Australian Digital Health Agency.
Even the tens of millions that the government has committed to artificial intelligence in the budget does not include caveats for the use of local technology companies. There are no targets or goals in relation to developing local capability or underwriting local technology development.
The result is an open valve on a firehose of federal dollars being directed offshore.
Tech spending without mandated participation for local companies is a missed opportunity
What a shame. If this ongoing global pandemic has taught us anything, it is that sovereign capability and sovereign capacity in the delivery of strategically important products and services is paramount.
And government should use their king-sized budgets – their information technology purchasing power – to drive industrial capability. The federal government spends up to $10 billion annually on IT products and services.
The Australian government’s $1.2 billion digital economy strategy includes significant spending on projects that will deliver better digital services and underpin a more effective digital economy.
But by ignoring the industry development potential of its tech procurement muscle, it is leaving value on the table.
New South Wales has found the right balance in this regard. The NSW government is considered a world leader in digital delivery. Certainly, it is the stand-out among its peers in this country.
When NSW announced a $1.6 billion tech stimulus program in the middle of 2020 to accelerate the states digital delivery program, it was upfront about its concurrent aim of boosting not only service delivery outcomes but also the state’s local industry capability.
From April this year, NSW mandated that at least 30 per cent of the state’s tech procurement spend would go to local SMEs. At the time, NSW Customer Service Minister Victor Dominello talked about a double-win for the state – an economic stimulus package that delivered both better digital services as well as local industry capability.
Spending on big digital projects in NSW – the state spends more than $2.5 billion on its tech – must pass through not only the Expenditure Review Committee of the Cabinet, but also its Delivery and Performance Committee (DaPCo).
Mr Dominello said last year that the large tech suppliers are on notice and that DaPCo wants the public service to restructure its relationships with vendors to both ensure digital capability transfer and improved opportunities for local SMEs.
The federal government has none of this. It does not measure participation rates for local tech companies, and it does not set targets for their involvement. There is no effort to attach a local industry development requirement to its procurement policies in the tech sector.
The 2021 Budget had just one small initiative, run out of the Industry department – just $2.6 million over four years “to support and strengthen business participation in government procurement”.
The program will map common “pain points for SMEs” and look to improve communications of opportunities to potential suppliers. The program will also fund “Government Procurement Learning Events for SMEs”.
Which sounds like Snoresville when compared to a Cabinet-level edict that mandates at least 30 per cent of the NSW government ICT procurement addressable spend – excluding contingent labour – must be spent directly with SMEs.
Australia cannot build everything and of course we must rely on overseas technology. But we can do better, and government tech procurement budgets are an obvious industry development policy lever.
The results of university student experience ratings including those recently released in Australia (Quality Indicators for Learning and Teaching) have shown a large drop in the learning experience students have received over the last year in many institutions.
Universities and some commentators have been quick to raise the global pandemic as the major contributing factor to this significant decrease. Although this is undoubtedly the case for a number of reasons, online learning seems to be under particular fire as a result and is in danger of becoming collateral damage.
So has the shift to predominantly online provision over the last year really been the cause of such student unhappiness? We believe it is not the move to online that is the issue, but rather the speed and nature of the move.
Dr Darrell Evans: The rush to online needn’t have led to hit-and-miss results
Many educators quickly took up the challenge and responded by adapting their learning and teaching approaches to accommodate restrictions on providing face-to-face opportunities.
The effort and creativity demonstrated undoubtedly led to some very effective outcomes and institutions certainly owe a great deal of debt to their educators and others supporting the learning experience.
However, it can be argued that for many courses the result has been the delivery of a remote learning strategy accentuated by a transfer of many traditional and face-to-face aligned approaches to an online platform without thinking about how learners will engage and interact with it, rather than the creation of a purposely designed online learning experience.
The somewhat unfavourable outcomes of the student experience are therefore not unexpected.
There appeared to be a perception from some institutional leaders that the move to remote learning meant that the online learning box was ticked and that capability and expertise to deliver was in place.
The results from the student surveys however demonstrate that the experience developed did not meet the expectations of the students and unfortunately the consequence has been for some leaders to now imply that an online learning experience cannot be as good as a face-to-face experience and the quicker the return to the on-campus environment the better.
Such a view is misplaced and disappointing as the actual issue of effective online curriculum design is not being addressed. Arguably those institutions with strong records in online provision did far better in student surveys than some others, although more detailed analysis needs to occur.
To ensure a positive experience that leads to enhanced learning gain, online learning needs to be developed within a curriculum design framework that is based on effective pedagogical principles and in the knowledge of what makes online learning work for students.
This means incorporating an ability for students to connect with educators and their peers to promote social learning; active facilitation and learning support that takes account of learner availability; and the utilisation of quality learning approaches, effective digital learning assets and appropriate smart technologies that align with an online delivery environment.
Similarly, the provision of a set of learning resources with an “off you go” message to learners fails to understand the need to create a navigable, curated and intuitive environment for students to engage with their learning.
Should the educator alone be expected to transition to an online learning mindset and create and deliver all elements of an effective online curriculum? The answer must surely be no.
While enabling the capability of all educators in curriculum design is important, we must remember that there are increasing numbers of instructional design professionals with the knowledge and skills to work with educators in developing effective learning strategies across online and face-to-face provision.
Some universities have their own in-house team of designers working on curriculum development, but there are also dedicated companies specialised in learning design who can assist in the sustainable set up of online learning.
Utilising such know-how also has the advantage of benefitting from effective project management capability ensuring design outcomes are produced on time, on budget and fit-for-purpose.
The global pandemic and results of student experience surveys have exposed the importance of purposely designing online learning. It is therefore essential to bring educators, instructional designers and others together to ensure a deliberate approach to effective curriculum design and development results and that online learning and digitally engaged learning is not viewed as second best.
Dr Darrell Evans is a senior advisor to Australian learning solution specialists Liberate Learning
Builders are being advised to “get on top of registration and understanding the declaration process” under the new building reforms that are about to hit the NSW construction industry.
“Obviously there will be a flood of applications, so it’s important to get in early to be across the contract administration exercise from 1st of July,” Ms Metcalfe said.
“It’s important to look at your procurement process to figure out who is supplying your declarations. These declarations will ensure all participants of a project know what their obligations are to the building code and ensure that their designs are integrated with the designs of others.”
Building boom: Big regulatory changes are imminent in the NSW construction sector
The new measures will impact any organisation involved in the financing, design, or construction of ‘Class 2 buildings — multistorey residential apartment buildings — and any multipurpose building with a Class 2 component. They are aimed at implementing provisions of the Design and Building Practitioners Act 2020.
The act and regulation have their origins in a reportBuilding Confidence: improving the effectiveness of compliance and enforcement systems for the building and construction industry across Australia. Co-authors Professor Peter Shergold and Bronwyn Weir published the report in February 2018 and made 24 recommendations designed to boost and enforce compliance with construction rules. Individual states are at various stages in their implementation of some of the report’s recommendations.
In NSW for instance, the NSW Building Commissioner is closely watching and engaging with the industry to enforce new regulations. With the new rules comes the challenge of getting on top of the processes, procedures, and information sharing required to manage and demonstrate compliance.
Digital platforms required
Building Confidence report co-author Bronwyn Weir, a legal practitioner specialising in government regulation — who has discussed the report previously with InnovationAus — told the Quality Conversation webinar that a major challenge faced by all parties impacted by the new regime would be providing, accessing and sharing all the information it will require.
Ms Weir expects the NSW Government to enable the use of digital platforms to support the process but said there would need to close collaboration with industry.
“We need to think about all the potential uses the information is put to and how it can be shared so that the different stakeholders can get access rather than having silos of information that will create privacy and other information-sharing issues,” she said.
“Building companies and associated stakeholders will have multiple needs for information to see different parts of that information for their own purposes. For example, insurance will want to see a different set than building managers, post-construction.
“If we can get it right and draw on some of the really great stuff that’s out there and create a broader set of shared information for shared benefit, I think we’ll see some very exciting changes over the next five to 10 years.”
Insurance Council of Australia general manager for policy and regulatory affairs Aparna Reddy emphasised the focus that the insurance industry has on collaboration when grappling with the changes and what it means for coverage.
Ms Reddy explained that the Insurance Council has been engaging with Engineers Australia, architects, brokers, Consult Australia and others to work through the changes, especially when it comes to retrospective elements of the changes and the challenges they present.
The challenge of product information
Institute of Quality Construction (IQC) chief executive Professor Chris Bulmer identified a major information challenge around just one aspect of the new regulation: confirming that building products are compliant.
When discussing digital platforms, Mr Bulmer commented said: “Something the industry needs to get on top of very quickly is a platform to attain and maintain an integrated set of product information that can be used right across the marketplace, if that’s at all possible.
“We’ve got a whole range of challenges: the birthplace of materials used offsite, how they are used offsite and how manufactured products are used in installations.”
Ms Metcalfe, echoed this sentiment, stating that when it comes to the use of technology for documentation and compliance, she is seeing a broad range of sophistication.
“Some clients are very progress in the technology they use and others are not.”
Ms Weir said the Australian Building Codes Board had issued a discussion paper on a new quality assurance framework for building products, and the NSW regulations would require product documentation to confirm compliance with the specifications that emerge.
“Anyone looking at building product issues should have a look at the framework that’s out for discussion,” she said. “It talks about the things that [Professor Bulmer] has mentioned around product technical statements and how we ensure the quality of products that have been specified in design material.”
Ms Weir also outlined initiatives such as a title block which will go on all design drawings, stating, “that’s all part of the digital capability of the department to keep a track of everything, keep a record of everything, and importantly, to keep a track of registered practitioners so that if you move from project to project, you will be tracked through the system in effect.”
Confirming design compliance
Professor Bulmer said demonstrating compliance to design regulations at all levels of the industry ‘food chain’ would be another major information challenge.
“How will design managers take a design that’s been completed by others and then provide that to subcontractors who have internal design responsibilities as well?” he asked.
“I think the layering of design responsibilities from a design management perspective is going to be a significant challenge. The IQC has recognised that. It’s one of the areas we’re focussing on: making sure that design compliance is being adhered to as we get further and further down the food chain.”
The full webinar Building Reform 2021 – The Quality Conversation, powered by Procore is available to watch on-demand here.
This article has been published as part of the Building Reforms 2021 – The Quality Conversation powered by Procore.
Labor has given a lukewarm welcome to Scott Morrison’s modest commitment to a National Artificial Intelligence Centre but says government must get past announcements and onto delivery.
Shadow industry minister Ed Husic says Labor has said for years that Australia needed a national approach to building capability in artificial intelligence, backed up by serious investment.
But he says government had a poor track record of delivery in building local industry and chipped the Prime Minister for overseeing industry policy focused on adopting technology from overseas, rather than creating technology and supporting industry here.
Scepticism: Artificial Intelligence centre needs delivery
The government on Thursday unveiled a $1.2 billion Digital Economy Strategy as a pre-budget drop. The strategy is a broad swag of spending initiatives ranging from run-of-business programs in government like the myGov redevelopment and digital identity, to the creation of a National AI Centre in the CSIRO, supported by a network of AI and Digital Capability Centres.
“The Prime Minister’s announcement was little more than a spruiking of multinational tech companies, saying that Australian businesses have digitally transformed the way they operate by using apps like UberEats or Deliveroo,” Mr Husic told InnovationAus.
“We can’t have a Prime Minister that is more energetic about international apps than nurturing Australian-led tech and innovation,” he said, calling Scott Morrison the “cheerleader-in-chief” for app stores.
“Scott Morrison has previously said he wants Australia to be the best at adopting technology from overseas, we need to recognise the potential Australia has to create and innovate in these spaces.”
“We need to develop this [tech] here. We have smart people in this country that are doing great work here that need to be celebrated, and more importantly, supported.”
Mr Husic, who was the architect of Labor’s national AI centre of excellence plan taken to the 2019 election said the national approach is welcome, but delivery is consistently a problem for the Coalition.
“Federal Labor has said for years that when it comes to artificial intelligence, we need a national approach, backed up by serious investment.
“We’ve seen what happens with this government’s strategies. Take for example the Modern Manufacturing Strategy. Sold with the headline figure of $1.5 billion, however, only $70 million is actually going out the door.
“The devil is always in the detail with this government.”
GFG Alliance’s Sanjeev Gupta has refinanced debt for the Whyalla steelworks ending speculation the collapse of a financier to the company threatened the closure of the works.
The company has secured a $430 million refinancing of the steelworks and his Tahmoor Coal operations to replace funds provided by the collapsed group Greensill Capital.
GFG Alliance said in a statement that the Greensill debt would now be repaid in full.
Port of Whyalla: Goods news for the steelworks from Sanjeev Gupta
“GFG Alliance is pleased to announce that Liberty Primary Metals Australia has agreed terms to refinance its Greensill exposure.”
Premier of South Australia Steven Marshall said the much improved performance of the Whyalla Steelworks had contributed to the refinancing.
“Our Government remains a steadfast supporter of the people of Whyalla, the local Council and of course the steelworks and the Middleback Ranges mining operations.
“The South Australian and Federal governments have worked closely together to give potential financiers the confidence to back Whyalla.
“This is the outcome all South Australians were hoping for and I look forward to the Whyalla Steelworks continuing its transformation as a key employer in Whyalla and the Iron Triangle.”
Federal Education Minister Alan Tudge’s push for better engagement between universities and industry signals renewed ambition and dynamism among higher education policymakers. Research commercialisation is being pitched as the way to rejuvenate a higher education sector plunged into crisis by the COVID-19 pandemic. Government has a crucial role to play in this process, and we have identified three specific steps it can take to help Australia catch up with the world’s best.
Australia’s public universities are world-class research bodies. But, unlike many universities in places like Europe and the United States, they are not good at building on that research for commercial returns. Australia’s level of research commercialisation is one of the worst in the developed world.
This has been a vexed issue for Australian universities and governments for many years. Tudge has highlighted how research spending in Australia is four times what it was 20 years ago, but invention disclosure numbers remain basically unchanged. Compared to Australia, public research organisations in the United States, Canada, United Kingdom and others have two or more times the level of invention disclosures and start-ups for every billion dollars spent on research.
Tudge pointed to the example of Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Its inventions generate more than A$2 billion in annual sales. For comparison, the most any Australian university received from foreign student tuition fees in 2019, the last pre-pandemic year, was less than A$1.1 billion.
The Hebrew University of Jerusalem earns twice as much from its inventions as any Australian university gets from international student fees. Shutterstock
Three big steps towards commercialising research
The minister has detailed some ways the federal government has encouraged commercialisation. These include adjustments to government grants for research. Yet these efforts are certainly not novel or sufficient. More can and should be done.
Benchmarking research commercialisation policies across other countries, we advocate three ways government can assist.
1. Federal and state governments should work to attract innovative anchor firms and VCs to Australia
Anchor firms are large, research-and-development-intensive and innovation-oriented organisations. Venture capital firms provide funding to the sort of start-up companies and small businesses expected to have high-growth potential.
Both sorts of firms are often integral to supercharging the commercialisation of research. Few, if any, of the most innovative technologies in the world would have been as ubiquitous without one or both of these two critical pillars of research commercialisation being involved at some point.
Australia’s woeful rankings in academic-industry collaboration cannot be blamed solely on universities. Australian industry itself invests less in research and development (R&D) than most of the developed world.
Anchor firms generally invest more heavily in R&D. They also are integral to supercharging commercialisation, through economies of scale (bigger consumer base) and scope (multiple markets).
Venture capital firms commercialise innovations on a global scale. Their presence in Australia has grown considerably in recent years. Australia’s Early Stage Venture Capital Limited Partnerships has helped, but more can be done.
Israel, for example, leads the world in venture capital investments as a percentage of GDP, but it wasn’t always this way. Under the Yozma program from 1993 to 1998 the government provided 40% of the money raised by private investors in the country. It operated in tandem with a direct investment program targeting small, high-growth start-ups.
2. Help academics to be more commercially focused (versus solely focused on research and teaching)
Cultural change must begin early with the future academic workforce, and governments should work with universities to achieve this. The government should consider bolstering initiatives focused on early-career researchers.
While select Australian universities and CSIRO have industry PhD programs, they are under-resourced and uncommon. Many are still in a pilot stage.
Countries like France and Denmark have carried out government-backed industry PhD programs with documented success. Their success is built on buy-in from all stakeholders and reliably consistent government support.
Benchmarking Australia’s policies against these countries and others helps identify ways for government to enhance applied research and industry engagement. These include ease of secondment from academia to industry, the maturing of industry postgraduate programs, non-university-based applied research institutes, and more.
3. Create a national Technology Transfer Office.
University research is typically commercialised through a technology transfer office (TTO). These can vary considerably in their function, mandate and structure from one university to the next. Some have a limited scope, leading to subpar commercialisation outcomes.
The federal government should create a national TTO that universities can access through a hub-and-spoke model, rather than duplicating resources with institution-level TTOs. This national office would have a larger objective beyond merely protecting institutional intellectual property and maintaining an inward institutional-looking perspective.
Like the German model, an Australian TTO should provide a bridge between the academic world and entrepreneurs, investors, industries and communities. It should work with the likes of the Australian Trade and Investment Commission to promote Australian R&D capabilities as well as state-based agencies such as Investment NSW.
As with WWII, a worldwide crisis has forced massive government interventions in Australia’s economy. The plight of Australian public research universities is dire, meaning government has a critical role to play.
The CSIRO has come together with science venture VC partners Main Sequence and a group of Australian industry partners to launch a space communications startup that traces its technology origins to WiFi and the Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder project.
The result is the launch of Quasar Satellite Technologies, a startup that CSIRO chief Larry Marshall says will allow ground stations to communicate with hundreds of satellites at once in support of a booming global space sector.
With more than 57,000 satellites expected to be launched in the next decade to underpin demand for space-derived data used in applications ranging from agriculture and environmental monitoring to defence and connecting the billions of sensors in the ‘Internet of Things’.
Present-day satellites typically track one satellite at a time, with heavy congestion limiting the potential of satellites and the downstream industries they support.
Phased Array: The CSIRO tech that can be traced to WiFi
The wholly Australian-owned Quasar Satellite Technologies aimed to use its Australian-invented and commercially developed technology to sell a global ground station “as-a-service” to the fast-growing worldwide satellite market, Dr Marshall told InnovationAus.
Quasar’s equity partners are partners include the research partner CSIRO, venture capital partner Main Sequence, and industry partners – all Australian – Vocus, Saber Astronautics, Fleet Space Technologies, and Clearbox Systems.
The company was also awarded a $1.9 million physical sciences grant from the Office of the NSW Chief Scientist & Engineer – which is not an equity partner – bringing together a total of $12 million in funding, technology and industry expertise.
Telecommunications industry veteran Phil Ridley, who has worked across some of Australia’s pioneering internet services including BigPond and Vividwireless, has been appointed as Quasar chief executive officer.
CSIRO space sector commercialisation specialist and a founding director at Quasar Dr Ilana Feain said the new company would draw on technology advances that can be traced in a direct line from the inventors of WiFI, through further development via CSIRO work on the SKA and now into a ground-breaking startup.
“The genesis of the technology was the development of the Phased Array Feed and that was developed by John O’Sullivan and his team – the inventors of WiFi – for the Australian Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder project,” Dr Feain said.
“So, it is wholly Australian-owned, and is in fact a CSIRO invention that was then a part of the SKA pathfinder project.”
CSIRO chief Dr Marshall says the Quasar startup was structured in line with the agency’s “venture science” principles, in which the CSIRO finds capital and industry expertise to bring on equity partners to take technology out of its laboratories and turn it into a commercial product.
The agency most recently did this through its V2Food plant-based meat startup that included partners Main Sequence and Competitive Foods Australia – the company behind burger giant Hungry Jacks.
Although identifying cash and in-kind inputs of $12 million, Dr Marshall says the precise value of inputs as the research partner can be tricky to measure.
“A big part of the secret sauce in these types of deals that we have been doing – these venture science deals – is that where we see something inside CSIRO or outside at a university, where we see we can bring [a piece of tech] into CSIRO labs we can spin up the TRL and de-risk it and make it a bit more investible,” Dr Marshall said.
“It’s a little difficult to say what that’s worth. It can turn into quite a lot of money, and we focus on how we can get the deal to the point where it appeals to the traditional investor from outside and who would see that as attractive.
“As you know in Australia industry is a bit risk-averse and investors are a bit risk-averse, so we have to carry them a little bit further up the TRL stack to get them over the line.
It is a Silicon Valley model, where VCs and industry outsiders work within research laboratories to identify technology that has a problem-solving commercial potential – even if Dr Marshall says Silicon Valley VC is not operating in this way to the same extent.
He says the valley “got lazy.”
“It is sort of a new model, but to be fair when I first went to Silicon Valley in 1998, for the first 25 years that I was in the valley, this is what Silicon Valley VCs actually did,” Dr Marshall said. “They came to work with Stanford and SRI and the US National Labs to try and do this.”
“And between you and me, I think they kind of got lazy. Silicon Valley became too successful, and they forgot how to make deals like this,” he said.
“In a way, Australia is sort of 20 to 30 years behind Silicon Valley, but I think we are going through that same evolution where we are realising if you really want to commercialise science, you have got to roll up your sleeves and actually go in there and do the engineering – whether you’re the investor or the founder, you’ve got to kind of work together to de-risk it.”
Manufacturing achieved its seventh straight month of growth in April, and its quickest rate of expansion in three years, according to the Australian Industry Group’s Performance of Manufacturing Index.
The overall PMI result of 61.7 was up 1.8 points in April. As with the month before, all six sectors tracked in the survey recorded a result above 50.
All seven activity indices were also above 50. Any result above 50 indicates expansion, and below it contraction. The PMI of 61.7 was the third-highest rate of growth ever since the PMI moved to monthly publication in 2001.
Manufacturing rebuild: Seven months of growth.
Capacity utilisation was at its highest level on record, which the Ai Group said suggested “employment and/or investment may need to step up in order to facilitate further growth from here.”
The end of the Jobkeeper wage subsidy on March 28 had apparently not dampened the recovery from the worst economic effects of the Covid-19 pandemic.
“That said, the further expansion of new orders in April is an encouraging pointer to continuing positive conditions over the next couple of months,” added Willox.
Cyber risk, the likelihood of data loss or business disruption resulting from a cyber-attack, is now seen by Australian organisations as one of the biggest risks they face, according to Alastair MacGibbon, chief strategy officer at CyberCX and former head of the Australian Cyber Security Centre.
“Cybersecurity is now number one or two on any organisation’s risk register – public or private,” Mr MacGibbon said.
The increased awareness of the danger that cyber threats pose to their operations is leading to a shift in responsibility for cybersecurity from IT departments to other parts of organisations, according to privileged access management specialists CyberArk’s senior vice-president for identity security, Barak Feldman.
Clockwise from top left: Thomas Fikentscher, James Riley, Alastair MacGibbon, and Barack Feldman
Goodbye CISO, hello BISO
Mr Feldman suggested a new role was emerging, that of business information security officer.
“We believe that security means taking more responsibility for the risk to the organisation, educating internally on awareness and how to prepare for a situation, and how to respond to it,” he said.
“Not just responding technically, but even how to respond to the media and different elements of a security attack.”
Mr MacGibbon said the increased focus on cybersecurity at board level had been rapid, with boards now showing a much more mature understanding of and response to cyber risk. Using traditional business risk language has helped boards to understand the impact of a cyber threat.
“Now most boards understand that what they’re dealing with is the concept of ‘cyber risk management’ and how resilient they are to cyber events,” Mr MacGibbon said.
“They recognise those events are likely to occur, an Assumed Breach Mindset, and it’s a more mature conversation than we were having at the launch of Australia’s first National Cybersecurity Strategy in April 2016.”
The increasing integration of operational technology with IT was also a factor in shifting responsibility for cybersecurity.
“We’re seeing a huge trend on the operational technologies side –manufacturing plants can work faster with more data analytics with remote access,” said Mr Feldman.
“I don’t need to go to the plant anymore, I can control it remotely and collect data on how fast I’m manufacturing my product, and so on. So that means the ownership is starting to be delegated into the business owners.”
Mr MacGibbon agreed, but suggested this was not a popular view. “I don’t believe chief security officers in organisation should report into an IT function because I don’t think that creates the right balance to have a proper risk discussion.”
Mr Fikentscher suggested that this trend has still yet to make an impact in many traditional sectors, and that their tardiness was increasing the risk for the more advanced organisations that are become connected in order to leverage benefits.
“Some of the industries that have been in this space for a longer period of time, like the banking industry, have their house in order,” he said.
“But, they are concerned about business connectivity, the wider ecosystem and how they secure that ecosystem as they open up their systems to accelerate digital transformation. For example, to allow people to have a view into the last 10 years of claims management.
“Then you go to other industries, which might fall under the new Critical Infrastructure Bill [the Security Legislation Amendment (Critical Infrastructure) Bill 2020, which will increase the scope of what is deemed to be critical infrastructure] like the food industry or the transport industry,” Mr Fikentscher said.
“Cyber risk management is something that is very new to them, and they need to start from the beginning and create a philosophy of how they attack that particular problem.”
It’s an ill wind…
And, unfortunate as the increase in cyberthreats is, Mr Fikentscher said it was having a positive impact by pushing many organisations to elevate cybersecurity to board level. “There are more cyber incidents, and that’s painful, but at the same time it wakes people up and focusses their minds on a very important element of their business.
“And, that’s not just happening in IT, it is reverberating through the business functions into the boardroom, and all of a sudden, people are starting to get things done.”
The Bridging the Cyber Divide series is produced as a partnership between InnovationAus and CyberArk.
The nation’s peak science lobby has renewed calls for a realignment of the R&D Tax Incentive that creates a premium to reward research collaboration as a way to improve outcomes in translating university research into commercial products and services.
In its submission to the government’s University Research Commercialisation consultation, Science and Technology Australia also called for a better balance between direct and indirect incentives for business investment in research.
The R&D Tax Incentive is the single biggest spending line item in government research investment, yet it is entirely undirected.
The STA says countries where commercialisation is a stronger part of their research culture, highly successful programs deliver direct investment from the government to incentivise industry involvement.
Research funding: Overcoming the valley of death
These include Catapult in the UK, the Small Business Technology Transfer program in the US, and the Strategic Innovation Fund in Canada.
“A similar approach could deepen incentives in Australia’s economy – which has a high proportion of small and medium business enterprises (SMEs),” the submission said.
“A proposed Research Translation Fund would provide co-funding for projects (in this case mission-based projects) to researchers and industry in a way similar to Canada’s Strategic Innovation Fund.”
Science and Technology Australia, which represents 88,000 scientists and technologists, called “short-termism” the biggest risk to building a successful commercialisation system, eroding industry trust and willingness to participate.
It also poured cold water on “mission-driven” research as a silver-bullet solution for improving research translation outcomes. “Mission-based” directed research – best illustrated by Apollo – has been a favoured model in recent years and was heavily recommended in the Innovation and Science Australia 2030 report.
“In our research sector, there are ideas waiting to be translated into products. There are also challenges yet to be imagined that will need the clever application of science to solve,” the STA submission said. “Any research commercialisation scheme must be flexible enough to span both opportunities.”
“While STA agrees there is merit in setting out clear ‘national missions’ to focus effort and deepen our existing competitive advantages, too prescriptive an approach around missions risk commercialisation projects not being developed if they fall outside these parameters – even if they have strong prospects for commercial translation and success,” STA said.
The STA wants national missions to “guide but not dictate” areas with strong commercialisation potential. It says that under the current policy settings, ‘blue-sky’ research has supporting mechanisms, as does the final step in commercialisation.
What is missing, it says, is support for ideas that are “nearly there” as they approach a so-called valley of death in the commercialisation of institutional research. STA wants the focus of re-invigoration efforts for commercialisation to be on research at TRL 4 and above (Technology Readiness Level).
Science and Technology Australia also called for funding to train 2000 “bench to boardroom scientists” who would bring an added layer of commercial skills to act as connectors between research teams and industry in commercialisation.
This does not mean the scientists are turned into commercialisation experts.
“Rather, we should focus on equipping up to 2000 leading researchers with the skills to champion the translation of technologies – a small proportion of the research workforce with the potential for vast social and economic impact.”
I almost bore myself when I start to write about issues with Facebook. The revelations of privacy scandals, data breaches, hate speech, and violence-inducing disinformation by Facebook has become such a regular occurrence in our news feeds that we are almost inured to its coverage.
It may be a symptom of how we’ve over-relied on Facebook and outsourced so much of our communication and community that we can overlook their recurring transgressions.
Ghosts of social networks past may provide a glimmer of doubt or hope in Facebook’s continued dominance. After all, bygone platforms like MySpace, Friendster and Flickr once ruled the internet.
It may surprise many that LinkedIn is actually older than Facebook, and continues to succeed to this day, albeit not at the same level.
Social network: There is a role for a publicly funded and publicly run alternative to Facebook and others
Diverse attempts at credible alternatives, like Ello, Diaspora, NextDoor and WT.Social have been met with mixed success, either finding loyal niche audiences to service, or suffering from scaling to a stable threshold and benefitting from the network effect.
However, many alternatives remain commercial, and the profit alternative is often powered by a harmful surveillance advertising model which plague the most successful social networks and creates harmful unintended consequences.
The reality is the Facebook ‘public square’ is more like a private mall, trapping consumers in an engagement frenzy that has resulted in a distorted and polarised public discourse.
So perhaps the issue is with the commercial model of social networking that surveils its users and monetises their attention.
In reimagining an alternative, what we might need is a model that is designed for public benefit and to serve community interests.
There are a small number of players that have attempted public/non-profit community-based networks that were explicitly designed for the public good and they are worth considering.
Vermont-based Front Porch Forum is essentially an actively moderated email list around local community issues and discussions.
It has been slowly and carefully managed over the last 20 years (eons in Internet time) with some very tightly managed rules of engagement, and an actively controlled culture. To this day, many residents use and enjoy the forum.
In Taiwan, Digital Minister Audrey Tang took inspiration from citizen hacktivists and put online collaboration at the core of its digital governance.
The official national online platform, called Join has over four million citizens participating and is a central platform to discuss official government policy. It is used to harvest feedback from citizens, and organise collaborative meetings where stakeholders are asked to find solutions to policy and local issues.
There is also the vTaiwan (virtual Taiwan) platform focused on grassroots citizen engagement, with debates on the platform influencing real-world policy like the legal status of Uber in the country. At a time when the public square is being threatened in developed democracies, new democracies like Taiwan is paving the way in rethinking governance with a digital system at its core, empowering new ways of civic and public engagement.
It is not just communities that have begun to over-rely on Facebook either, increasingly government and public services are using infrastructure from Big Tech companies like Facebook, Google and Amazon to reach citizens and as platforms for governance.
A desire for a secure, encrypted communication tool that was only available to French government agents led to the French messaging app called Tchap. Tchap is restricted to French officials but is built using open source code available to the public.
Amsterdam-based Public Spaces Coalition is a network of public broadcasters, filmmakers and the Dutch arm of Wikimedia on an ambitious project to enable community discussion and engagement using open source technology with a public model. Their mission is to provide “an alternative software ecosystem that serves the common interest and does not seek profit”.
The coalition defines its contribution as a “component provider” – providing online functions like user accounts as an alternative to Google and Facebook logins, content rating systems, and content management systems.
Majal is an Arabic social network that fulfilled the heady promise Facebook and other platforms have claimed over the years – that is, Majal has successfully connected and empowered marginalised communities.
Based in the Middle East and Africa Majal members include Kurdish civic groups, women and the queer community.
In a region that’s highly surveilled and persecuted, Majal allows anonymity, security and a platform to connect and organise, focusing on “amplifying voices of dissent” throughout the region.
Different organisations and public bodies around the world are pushing back against Facebook’s harmful surveillance model and has demonstrated that there are better ways forward.
It is time we start to reimagine our public square online, and consider real alternatives to harmful platforms that have usurped our public square, like a publicly funded social network.
‘The Public Square Project’ is a new report by The Australia Institute’s Centre for Responsible Technology.
Jordan Guiao is a Research Fellow at The Australia Institute’s Centre for Responsible Technology
In May 1926, the Australian inventor of the Sunshine Harvester, Hugh McKay, died. His homegrown invention had created the largest factory in Australia at the time, peaking at 3,000 workers, and transformed Australian agriculture.
Five days after McKay’s death, then Prime Minister Stanley Bruce gave the speech that would call into creation the CSIRO as we know it today, to “bring about co-operation” between industries, universities, and “every other agency at present handling scientific questions”.
Simply put, it was formed to be a national point of connection for research and industry.
His speech listed the successes of science agencies in the US and UK – but overlooked McKay, whose inventor-entrepreneur streak wasn’t recognised as being remotely connected to the question of universities or science institutes.
Nearly 100 years later and Australia still faces the same problem. Our universities have grown from about 15 in 1926 to more than 40 today, and our distinctly Australian industries in 1926 have diversified to reflect the global marketplace – but we still don’t have a national approach to commercialisation that embraces a diversity of paths to innovation.
Larry Marshall: A national commercialisation hub could sow a diverse field of innovation at scale
Innovation is a team sport, but it needs a level field to bring players together. A national commercialisation hub could tackle the many barriers to commercialisation in Australia, like a consistent approach to intellectual property, and matching breakthrough research with the fastest pathways to market.
I’m living proof of this challenge. I nearly took the university career track after my PhD because in Australia, that’s what you do with a PhD.
Instead, I decided to spend a year in Silicon Valley and see what my science could do. Twenty-six years and six companies later, I came home to Australia to see if CSIRO could be the catalyst our innovation system needed to turn great Australian science into commercial success, and deliver jobs and economic growth here in Australia rather than taking them overseas.
We also wanted to broaden Australia’s idea of commercialisation to consider scientist-entrepreneurs and venture science, because the more we do here, the more likely it will stay here and grow here.
CSIRO’s innovation catalyst strategy in 2015 set out to turn this vision into reality.
A catalyst can only work in collaboration, and only if it has the right ingredients around it, and we believe Australia has all those ingredients – world-class research, commercialisation expertise, uniquely Australian industries, and a growing investment community. The challenge was bringing all these ingredients into the same place.
Working with universities, we created the ON Accelerator to take scientists and their ideas through a rapid change program where they could fast fail their concepts and upskill their business acumen. In five years, ON has helped to create 62 new companies by supporting almost 3000 researchers from across CSIRO and 39 universities to take their ideas through to business concepts.
ON out-performed the US I-Corps accelerator, run by the National Science Foundation, roughly 2:1 for capital raised. More than that, it gave Australians solutions from science, like the CSIRO spin-out Coviu telehealth, which, during the pandemic, raised $6 million in capital, quadrupled their team, and saw a 10,000 per cent increase in web traffic.
We also created the CSIRO Innovation Fund, managed by Main Sequence, to create, fund, and accelerate deep tech companies that solve the world’s biggest challenges, and carry them across the ‘Valley of Death’ into commercial feasibility.
To date, the Fund has invested almost $115m in helping to create 26 companies and hundreds of jobs, translating science from CSIRO and 16 Australian universities into problem-solving businesses.
They’ve invested in companies like quantum software developer Q-CTRL out of the University of Sydney, which has grown to a business of nearly 40 people; and artificial intelligence/machine learning company Fivecast, which spun out of the Data to Decisions Cooperative Research Centre (D2D CRC) and is growing in both Australia and the US.
This week we’re celebrating the launch of Main Sequence’s second fund, raising an impressive $250 million. Even more exciting is the commercialisation model we’re focusing on with Fund 2, which we’re calling ‘Venture Science’.
Our deal creation model for venture science starts by identifying a great challenge and a global opportunity, then assembling the team to tackle it.
This brings together Australian science capability and infrastructure for testing, a pathway into market through a leading industry player, and venture investment to create a brand new company.
This is how deals were done when I was at Stanford, and it is the best way I know of to get science out of the lab. It’s how we created alternative protein company v2food, which has raised $112 million.
While these initiatives are aimed at commercialising more of Australia’s world-class research, they have not succeeded in a vacuum.
They grew on the foundations of CSIRO’s overall commercialisation program, which since 2015 has increased CSIRO’s equity portfolio tenfold and oversees over 450 active licenses. In fact, the Innovation Fund was founded with royalties from CSIRO’s WiFi patent.
Our commercialisation program also connects businesses with researchers in universities, and places PhD candidates in businesses, among other models to suit different innovation needs.
We’re proud of the role we’re playing in the start Australia has made – but it is only a start.
Prime Minister Bruce’s vision for CSIRO was to deliver stronger impact through a unified approach, and that is still at the heart of CSIRO’s role today.
But we know, as McKay did, that a few green shoots does not result in a harvest. A national commercialisation hub could sow a large and diverse field of innovation approaches and deliver commercialisation at scale.
The most important factor in the success of CSIRO’s programs is that they grew in a networked ecosystem of partners, drawing on decades of trust and understanding fostered between universities, businesses, government departments, and communities.
This is fertile ground, cultivated for over a century, and it’s ripe for its next crop. As we approach 100 years since the passing of McKay, our vision reflects the legacy of his Sunshine Harvester – not just to survive the valley of death, but to leap across it, and flourish in the sunrise of a new innovation ecosystem for Australia.
The Guardian put it beautifully on Saturday when it said that ‘Australian smarts and Chinese industrial might made solar power the cheapest power humanity has seen’.
This is the power of nations working together towards a common goal – though perhaps not to the advantage of Australia industrially in the case of solar PV.
Yet Scott Morrison thumbed his nose at cooperation with other nations at a virtual climate summit on Friday, repeating a climate target first set by ‘climate change is crap’ Tony Abbott – a 26 to 28 per cent reduction in emissions by 2030.
Tindo Solar in Adelaide is producing an array of renewables products. Photo: Tindo Solar
This when among our peers the US committed to 50 per cent cuts in emissions by 2030, the UK to 78 per cent by 2035, Japan to 46 per cent cut by 2030 and Canada’s to a 40 per cent to 45 per cent reduction.
Mr Morrison has so far escaped actually doing anything effective about climate on the one hand while encouraging coal and gas burning on the other with dissembling language such as his ‘practical steps’ and ‘technology-led’ approach.
In fact, we already have practical technologies to swiftly decarbonise – wind, solar and battery storage – which are already cheaper than fossil fuels.
Mr Morrison explained no change in our climate targets to Joe Biden and others with this gobbledygook: “Standing on the front foot, we are no stranger to those things.
“We are no stranger to the commitments for the achievement of those commitments which is ultimately is what matters at the end of the day.
“Australia we have a plan.”
So far the plan seems to involve first making us a pariah with our biggest trading partner by letting backbenchers bad mouth China.
Then second, inviting the rest of the world to shut us out of the other big economic areas the EU and the US as they impose carbon tariffs – which are surely coming.
While Tony Abbott, Malcolm Turnbull, and now Mr Morrison have been courting gas and coal, they have only halfheartedly encouraged alternative energy industries that will lower our emissions and create new exports such as green hydrogen.
We should be pouring money into plans to export green hydrogen to replace our LNG exports, and funding the many SMEs developing innovative energy products and services.
We should have more than just one manufacturer of solar panels, Tindo Solar (pictured), and we should be investing in companies with the technology to build an electricity distribution network of the future.
We should be funding research to decarbonise steel production to protect our iron ore exports (and also cement), and not the dead-end of carbon capture and storage.
Yes, we have announcements of hydrogen hubs but Canberra is also encouraging hydrogen from coal.
And there is the only discouragement of electric vehicles.
We have a self-righteous Prime Minister leading a Utopia-style government of daily announceables, of numerous ‘packages’ of public cash to fix the latest policy bushfire.
But as far as energy and industry are concerned we have an impression of action while the years tick by and our industrial and export structure looks more and more threatened.
The World Economic Forum recently pointed out that cyberattacks rank first among global human-caused risks and this year, it’s expected cybercrime will cost the world US $11.4 million each minute. Let that sink in for one moment.
It’s no wonder cybersecurity has emerged as one of the hottest topics for Australian boardrooms – especially in the context of accelerated digitisation and prolific cybercriminal activity driven by Covid-19.
At the same time, geo-political pressures on Australia to adopt internationally recognised cybersecurity standards and build safer critical infrastructure are growing.
An increase in cybersecurity is needed. Yet, no matter what we do, the stats keep showing more successful attacks, more data breaches, and more system compromises.
Road to nowhere: What the big selling EH Holden can tell us about cybersecurity
What are we missing?
To quote the immortal words of Albert Einstein, “the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.”
For years we’ve been adding more security layers on top of each other, and on top of systems not organically designed to be secure, in the hope that one day we’ll reduce our vulnerabilities. Yet, the issue gets bigger each day.
Those security layers, while needed, only help us keep up with the rising complexity of the threat landscape, not get on top – or ahead – of it.
Something else needs to be done to drive a different outcome. It won’t happen overnight, but it is critical we change what we’re doing, as well as our overall cybersecurity thinking.
Are we repeating the same mistakes over again?
As a nation we understand the importance of ramping up cybersecurity however, on the whole, we still have a relatively passive posture towards it.
What we’ve done so far is much like car safety before the 1970s; investing resources in making driving safer by insisting people pass driving tests, fining drivers for bad behaviour, while also adding road speed limits, stop signs, and traffic lights.
When it comes to cyber, we’ve continuously focused on user awareness, user access control, traffic monitoring, protecting endpoint devices, data networks and computing infrastructure.
While those have their place, just like driver training and licensing plays a role in road safety today, they do not shift the cyber-incident needle materially. Governments, organisations and people are still having more fatal accidents – in a cyber sense.
In the same way car safety needed to go deeper in the 60s, so too does our cybersecurity approach.
Embedded safety learnings from the EH Holden days
Auto industry lessons from the past may teach us how to fundamentally improve safety and remove the roadblocks from our current ineffective cybersecurity approach.
Prior to the 1970s, there was a direct correlation between the number of cars registered and the number of road fatalities. This was despite safety features being available on many vehicles as premium options, mandatory licensing of drivers, and investment in better road signage and infrastructure, which is very similar to what we’re seeing in cybersecurity today.
Then something changed. Car ownership exploded in Australia – a large part of it driven by the EH Holden which would become one of the most successful cars Holden ever built – very much like today’s accelerated digitisation of our economy.
In just a few years every family owned a car (Holden produced more than 256,959 EH models in 18 months), the road toll proportionally rose, and it became apparent a change was needed to improve auto safety.
It took years, but government and manufacturers finally realised that safety needed to be embedded into every car if they were to reduce the community cost and reputational damage of car related deaths.
From the late 1960s until today, we’ve seen both the legislative and industrial embedding of safety features into the vehicles themselves.
Starting with mandates on the likes of seat belts, collapsible steering columns, and airbags, to later manufacturers proactively embedding advanced safety features such as ESC, adaptive cruise control, and anti-collision systems (manufacturers came to realise it was good for business).
This took safety out of the hands of the drivers and road conditions.
Embedded security lessons for cyber
We need a new approach that doesn’t expect every person who attends cybersecurity awareness training to be the cybersecurity equivalent of Lewis Hamilton.
Often when it comes to digital systems, it’s the data itself we are trying to protect from accidental or deliberate damage to its confidentiality, integrity or availability.
Some data-dependent organisations today – very (very) few though – have recognised the need for embedding security and have invested in digital systems that are fundamentally different in their approach. These systems codify security using data encryption, anonymisation, and access controls. They no longer rely solely on user behaviour or computing infrastructure.
If we want to protect our digital economy we need to stop thinking of cybersecurity as a user problem, or as something that can be fixed through infrastructure. We need to start embedding it in digital business processes and systems.
Just like the EH Holden had the potential to be much safer, all the tools for embedding safety into digital systems and data platform already exist – the missing piece is the realisation and will by industry and government to re-think, re-frame our cybersecurity strategy: it’s time to embed, not add on.
Brian Grant is ANZ Director for Digital Security at Thales
There is something perplexing about the way our federal government talks about industry development policy, according to Brisbane-based AI scale-up Max Kelsen chief executive Nick Therkelson-Terry. It never talks about software.
The greatest wealth-creating industry the world has ever known, and our federal political leaders don’t spruik its value, as a job-creator, export-earner, or productivity-driver. Yes, this is indeed perplexing.
Max Kelsen was established in 2015 around the time of the National Innovation and Science Agenda – the Ideas Boom – when startups and innovations were recognised and riding a high-profile wave of federal love.
And while the residual benefits of the Malcolm Turnbull-inspired NISA continue to have a positive impact, this government has gone quiet on the software sector. Perplexing is a good word for it.
In this episode of InnovationAus.com’s Commercial Disco, Mr Therkelsen-Terry talks about the boundless opportunity of artificial intelligence as a horizontal, general technology, and Max Kelsen’s largely bootstrapped fast growth.
And he talks about the frustration of running a high-growth company in a high-value market that has limitless export potential in a country where that opportunity is not recognised, let alone seized.
“I would love for someone in government – in the federal government and preferably the Prime Minister – to get up and say: ‘Software is an important industry for this country’,” Mr Therkelsen-Terry said.
“We hear about advanced manufacturing, we hear about tourism and about everything else, but the world – and I had to break this to everyone – the world is software now.
“Everything is software now. The biggest companies in the world are software companies – and yet our policy-makers seem completely incapable of saying the word ‘software’,” he said. “That to me is totally perplexing.”
Max Kelsen has grown from a standing start in 2015 to a company with 50 employees and more than 50 per cent of its revenue now coming from outside Australia. It has done this without taking on VC partners (although it did a tiny family-and-friends round), self-funding incredible growth.
Nick Therkelsen-Terry: The CEO of AI outfit Max Kelsen wants a spotlight on software
The company has built an AI platform product and its continued build through AI consulting services and custom development of the platform. Its corporate customers include Woodside, the big banks, and Dominos, but its biggest market is among top-tier health care and life sciences – particularly in diagnostics.
Its product provides a weightless export built entirely in Australia, Mr Therkelsen-Terry says, another reason the lack of discussion about software, and the lack of enthusiasm in the language used to describe tech builders.
“The language that’s used around the technology sector doesn’t reflect the opportunity that the sector will provide for decades to come,” he said. “I just want to see our sector get the recognition and the impetus from policy-makers.”
Australia will continue to dig things out of the ground, and it will continue to manufacture things, he says.
“But we will also build software and ship it to the world and we will create a [software] sector here in Australia in what is the most transformational industry that we have seen in 100 years.”
Mr Therkelsen-Terry also discusses the Research and Development Tax Incentive and the way it is applied to software. And he talks about a nation in lock-down due to COVID, and the specific challenges and opportunities this creates for accessing global talent.
“The R&D Tax Incentive is an excellent policy and should certainly be retained. But the main thing is that we need clarity,” he said.
“There seems to be a view that software isn’t R&D, that R&D has to be done in a lab or done with physical things and can’t possibly be done with software.
“And this has caused businesses like ours and across the sector a lot of grief.”
The federal government and CSIRO have announced new funding and new initiatives to drive research and investment in future energy systems.
On Wednesday Prime Minister Scott Morrison announced $540 million for clean hydrogen hubs in regional Australia and carbon capture, storage and utilisation projects and hubs.
Today CSIRO revealed it was joining the Global Power System Transformation (G-PST) consortium, a research partnership that will focus on accelerating the decarbonisation of the electricity system.
CSIRO will join the project with the Australian Energy Market Operator (AEMO), the University of Melbourne, RMIT University, and global consultancy Stratagen.
Energy future: The Prime Minister has dished out cash for energy technology
Morrison’s announcement said the upcoming budget would include:
$275.5 million to accelerate the development of four additional clean hydrogen hubs in regional Australia and implement a clean hydrogen certification scheme.
And $263.7 million to support the development of CCS/CCUS projects and hubs.
He said the investment would create around 2,500 jobs, support Australian industry and manufacturing into the future and reduce emissions.
“It is essential we position Australia to succeed by investing now in the technologies that will support our industries into the future, with lower emissions energy.
“…We cannot pretend the world is not changing. If we do, we run the risk of stranding jobs in this country, especially in regional areas.”
The government did not detail the type of projects that would be assisted, however there are some small CO2 reuse projects already underway providing local jobs.
Last month Air Liquide announced it would build a CO2 production plant at Esso’s Longford gas processing site in Victoria, capturing and selling the CO2 gas.
However, carbon capture projects have not lived p to expectations – a $3 billion capture plant operated by Chevron on the North-West Shelf is currently out of action with blocked filters.
Meanwhile, CSIRO’s G-PST initiative will focus on the development of Australian research plans for a variety of topics associated with the G-PST research agenda.
These include quantifying the technical requirements of future power systems to operate reliably and at least cost, and understanding the opportunities associated with Australia’s world-leading levels of rooftop solar.
The group will also focus on inverter design, power system stability tools and methods, restoring electricity systems with 100 per cent renewable energy, and developing a Control Room of the Future for AEMO and other grid and market operators.
The Victorian government has committed $50 million to support the manufacture of mRNA vaccines in the state because of global vaccine supply insecurity.
Pfizer and Moderna vaccines are the first globally to have been made with this technology which is not presently available in Australia.
Acting Premier James Merlino told a media conference: “It is vital that we can develop and manufacture mRNA vaccines and treatments locally to ensure we can have vaccine security here in Australia and across the region.”
James Merlino: The acting Victorian premier commits $50m to vaccine manufacturing
Mr Merlino said the commitment was a significant announcement for Victoria and the nation.
“The Commonwealth has identified onshore manufacturing of mRNA vaccines as a national priority.
“(We will) be providing $50 million to kick-start the onshore manufacturing of mRNA vaccines right here in Victoria….it will be the first in the Southern Hemisphere.”
Mr Merlino said this was a collaborative project with Monash University, the University of Melbourne, the Doherty Institute and other researchers.
“….and of course with the Commonwealth government.”
Mr Merlino said mRNA vaccines were low cost and high efficacy, with this being demonstrated during the Covid-1`9 pandemic.
Late last year, the federal government commissioned McKinsey & Co to develop a business case for local mRNA manufacturing but no action has been taken as a result.
Whether it’s driving a car, making a medical diagnosis by referencing a database of historical cases, finding potential new drugs, or playing chess, artificial intelligence is increasingly performing tasks as well as – and in some cases better than – humans.
Humans are subject to the rule of law. Kill or injure someone while driving a car and you might find yourself charged with negligence, or worse.
But what happens when an autonomous vehicle kills someone? A robot is not subject to the law. So is the car manufacturer liable, or the developer of the software? And how do you pinpoint the cause of such an accident?
Treating humans and artificial intelligence as equals before the law
University of Surrey (UK) professor of Law and Health Sciences Ryan Abbott argues that the law should not discriminate between AI and human behaviour and proposes a new legal principle of equal treatment that he claims will ultimately improve human wellbeing.
Meet the Reasonable Robot
Professor Abbott has made his case in a book The Reasonable Robot: Artificial Intelligence and the Lawand he discussed his proposal with Professor Jeannie Marie Paterson from the University of Melbourne’s Centre for AI and Digital Ethics (CAIDE) in a webinar co-hosted by CAIDE and the Australian Society for Computers and Law (AUSCL).
It followed an AUSCL webinar in March in which Abbott discussed a more specific issue of AI and the law: the inability for either AI or its developer to be cited in a patent filing as the creator of any invention produced by AI.
In the most recent webinar, Professor Abbott made the point that the law’s differential treatment of AI and humans has implications beyond the deterrence and punishment of wrongdoing. He argues it has negative and socially harmful consequences, and there should be less discrimination between the two.
You can’t tax a robot worker
“If my employer, the University of Surrey could get a robot to automate my job, which they will someday, they would save money doing that, even if we were both equally good, because they have to make National Insurance contributions [a UK earnings tax that funds state pensions and other benefits] for my work and a host of other reasons, but the machine is taxed more favourably.
“So, we have different tax rules applied to human behaviour and AI behaviour, and this results in some perverse outcomes.”
Professor Abbott argues that, as a general principle, laws applying to humans and AI should be drafted to best achieve their underlying goals, rather than making any distinction between humans and robots.
“In distributional systems, the law could aim to promote fair distribution of resources or promote commerce. In intellectual property it might be promoting innovation, in the case of patent law, or in copyright law. In tort law, it is primarily incentivising safety. In a broader sense, it really is helping the law better do what that area of law is intended to do.”
In the case of traffic law one of the main aims is to minimise death and injury on the roads, and to this end Professor Abbott argues that, when autonomous cars become a practical proposition, the law should hold humans and AI to the same standard.
Treat AI and human drivers equally
Under current law, if an autonomous vehicle caused a fatality, the legal redress would be against the manufacturer through product liability law. Professor Abbott argues this could be very difficult and costly to prove. Therefore, the AI should be held to the same standards as a human driver.
“Did [the AI] run a red light without a good reason? If so, and a reasonable person wouldn’t have done that the AI is liable, not what was going on in an AI that caused it to run a red light.”
Under this scenario, human drivers – who today, Abbott said, cause 94 per cent of accidents and 1.3 million fatalities every year – would, in the eyes of the law, be judged by the standards of AI, and likely found wanting.
“If it’s practical to automate the actor’s behaviour that should set the standard to apply to all actors. If you cause an accident we would say, ‘would a reasonable self-driving car have caused this accident?’ If so, you won’t be liable. If not, you would be.”
In practice he concedes this would mean that a human driver would almost always be liable, “because a self-driving car could stop any accident through superhuman sensors and ultrafast decision making.”
This example illustrates the general principle of The Reasonable Robot. “The argument of the book is essentially that, as machines step into the shoes of people and do these same sorts of activities, we want them held to similar sorts of standards, regardless of how they are programmed and regardless of why machines execute certain programming because behaviour is very functional as opposed to design issues,” Professor Abbott said.
The digitisation of records and archives plays a vital role in our democracy and history. Too often, ‘digital transformation’ is equated to MyGov, apps and the like: our mindset of digital transformation is far too narrow.
In reality, ‘digital transformation’ of the past has a far greater impact on our future and who we are as a people.
Both my husband Allan (an ex-RAAF officer) and I have relatives who served, several of who paid the ultimate sacrifice with their lives.
As we approach ANZAC Day, I thought I would bring attention to how digital technologies are helping us to discover their stories and how these technologies will preserve those stories for future generations.
Online: The digital transformation of records has opened up a window into the past
The Australian and state governments have played a major role in this important work.
The National Archives of Australia (NAA) has scanned and digitally recorded all of the war service records for Australians who fought in the Great War, World War One.
The NAA is now in the process of scanning the one million records they hold documenting the service of Australian men and women in WW2.
The Australian Government funded this work with $10 million in April 2019 to enable completion within four years. Once scanned, they are available online for free.
Allan’s paternal grandfather, Ernest Henry Johnson, served in both WW1 and WW2. His horrific story and sacrifice was never really told.
Ernest’s scanned WW1 record was certainly not bland. It documented his joining as a 17-year-old to try and help feed his family as the man of the house. He was a boy soldier.
Ernest was charged with petty theft during training but was immediately discharged when it was discovered he was under-aged. But with the pressure to provide for his family, he joined again shortly afterwards.
There were no computers back then and teenagers shopped recruiting offices to find one that would accept them. The Lost Boys documents the tragedies that followed many of these under-aged recruits.
Ernest fought at Ypres and was gassed. When repatriated to England he appears to have ‘married’ a young Scottish woman but there is little information. After returning to Australia, he married an Australian girl but subsequently divorced.
Shell shock (now PTSD) and the effects of being gassed, led to the demon drink. He then married Allan’s grandmother and had 6 children.
Ernest signed up again and served with the Citizen Military Force (CMF) in Australia and was trained as a cook. He was discharged in early 1944 as a Lance Sergeant.
When Allan was a young boy, he had heard vague stories of Ernest (his Pop) serving on ships but none of this appeared in his war records.
But the NAA had also scanned a scrap of one of Ernest’s last will and testaments. Dated mid-1944 it said “I, Ernest Henry Johnson of the US Small Ships Section…”
Did Ernest have US war service?
We discovered an amazing group called the US Army Small Ships Association and they explained that the ‘US Small Ships’ was a volunteer group of boys too young and men too old to serve.
They were recruited by the US Army Transportation Corps to sail fishing trawlers and barges into hostile Japanese occupied PNG waters to deliver men and supplies. Many lost their lives; it was extraordinarily dangerous work. The Rag Tag Fleet tells their story.
The service of these brave sailors was not recognised until 2009! US Defense keeps excellent records and we were able to have Ernest discharged from the US Army and have applied for Ernest’s US Service Medals.
Imagine, almost 75 years after Ernest’s service ended, digital archives enabled Ernest’s service to be recognised and for him to be honourably discharged from service.
We have also applied to Australian Defence for posthumous issue of Ernest’s Australian service medals for his Small Ships service. All this from a scanned scrap of paper.
The information from the US Army listed the ships Ernest had served on. We were able to use this information to search the Royal Australian Navy’s website for the scanned WW2 Merchant Ship Records and work out exactly where Ernest had sailed.
Several other government-funded or operated websites and repositories were crucial to this search. Trove filled in many of the details of Ernest’s life with scanned newspaper articles.
NSW BDM digitally provided the information confirming that Ernest was born out of wedlock, that his father married Ernest’s mother the same year his first wife died and that Ernest had several stepsiblings.
Between Trove and NSW BDM Allan was able to flesh out his beloved grandfather’s life in considerable detail.
The digital technologies and online resources revealed other coincidental discoveries.
Allan’s own birth was registered by the then NSW BDM Registrar, a gentleman called Theodore le More Wells. Le More Wells was wounded several times in WW1 and was awarded the Military Cross for bravery.
Interestingly, whilst Registrar he centralised holding of all NSW birth records in Sydney and introduced photocopying of records – two great initiatives without a consulting firm in sight! His innovation led to Allan being able to discover his grandfather’s family history online.
We have used the times of Covid to research online the military histories of all of our relatives and ancestors. We found more who died because of their service. More teenagers trying to join their big brothers in the war. The tragic aftermath for their mothers, widows and children.
Their stories would have been lost to us if innovators like Theodore le More Wells and countless others who followed him hadn’t adopted digital technologies to capture and preserve these important records.
This time, government digital deserves a pat on the back.
Ernest’s story is no longer lost to the past but can be honoured in perpetuity. A young boy soldier, who fought in two world wars, served Australia and the United States, who was gassed and suffered for life.
The final step for us has been the gradual uploading of the stories and images we have discovered onto the Virtual War Memorial of Australia.
This preserves them for our grandchildren, for future generations and for researchers everywhere.
But most importantly it allows us all to remember and honour their sacrifice.
The government’s back-to-the-future decision to move the Digital Transformation Agency into the Department of Prime Minister & Cabinet is a good outcome for the sector and for progress in digitization across government, according to the Australian Information Industry Association.
The shift back to a central agency would give the DTA more clout to lead digital transformation across government and to align with the work of the Digital Transformation Taskforce and other PM&C activities, the AIIA said.
The Governor-General David Hurley last week signed an administrative arrangements order with the Prime Minister shifting the DTA from its home in the Social Services portfolio back into Prime Minister and Cabinet.
Separate orders specified that newly installed Employment Minister Stuart Robert, who had been Government Services Minister until the reshuffle earlier this month, would retain responsibility for the Digital Transformation Agency.
My life as a MOG: The Digital Transformation Agency is back to PM&C
The tech industry’s peak advocacy body, the AIIA renewed a memorandum of understanding with the Digital Transformation Agency in March to continue the strong collaboration between the Australian Government and the information technology industry.
“The DTA sitting inside PM&C also means it can align to the work of the Digital Transformation Taskforce and other PM&C activities and taskforces that involve government transformation and digitization projects,” AIIA policy and advocacy general manager Simon Bush told InnovationAus.
“This will give the DTA more access and influence to lead digital government projects and provide portfolio agency advice.
“The AIIA has argued that government tech should lead in the digital transformation of the economy and not be excluded from policy and we see this shift to the centre as positive,” Mr Bush said.
Not everyone heralded the changes, with shadow minister for government services and the NDIS Bill Shorten lampooning Stuart Robert’s continued involvement in service delivery.
“After the Robodebt scandal, I would not trust Stuart Robert to run a digital calculator, let along the Digital Transformation Agency,” Mr Shorten told InnovationAus.
“It’s another chaotic change when Australians are longing for a stable government. The Government also shows it lacks faith in Linda Reynolds,” he said.
But the AIIA’s Simon Bush backed Mr Robert, saying he had been a strong advocate for the role of the DTA, and for the role of the technology sector in the economy. The AIIA welcomed the continuity of working with the same minister on digital transformation, despite Mr Robert’s shift to the Employment portfolio.
“Minister Robert has been a strong advocate and supporter of the role of DTA and its continued funding,” Mr Bush said.
“The Minister wanted to continue to have the responsibility for the DTA and we look forward to continue to have a good working relationship with him.”
“One area we look forward to working with the DTA moving forward is improving the digital skills and leadership of the APS, as well as cloud hosting, tech procurement and data policies.”
Mr Robert has cemented his imprint on whole of government digital transformation. He has retained his role as chair of the Cabinet’s important Service Delivery and Coordination Committee and been promoted to the powerful Expenditure Review Committee.
The DTA’s shift back into Prime Minister and Cabinet is a back-to-the-future move. The agency had started life in the Communications portfolio while Malcolm Turnbull was Communications Minister under then Prime Minister Tony Abbott.
The agency moved into PM&C under Malcolm Turnbull as Prime Minister – a champion of government-led service innovation as an engine for economic growth – but was then moved to the Department of Human Services within the Social Services.
That experiment has run its course, and the DTA is now shifted back to the PM&C as a central agency.
There have been numerous headlines in recent years about poorly constructed residential buildings and the resulting fallout for owners and residents. Among the most notorious were the 2014 fire at the Lacrosse Tower in Melbourne and the Christmas Eve 2018 evacuation of the Opal Tower in Sydney’s Olympic Park when cracks suddenly appeared and doors became jammed.
In response to these and other incidents federal and state governments are moving to impose tighter regulation on the industry. Bronwyn Weir, Director of Weir Legal and Consulting and a specialist in government regulation, says legislation and enforcement are critical but alone they will not solve the problem, because in some cases there will be insufficient resources to oversee and enforce legislation.
Ms Weir co-authored the seminal report Building Confidence: Improving the effectiveness of compliance and enforcement systems for the building and construction industry across Australia with Professor Peter Shergold, the chancellor of Western Sydney University and former secretary of the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet.
Bronwyn Weir: The challenge of building industry compliance issues
“I absolutely think that governments need to regulate better but there’s a balance to be found,” she says. “We need to rely on practitioners and industry associations to hold themselves to account, and to find ethical capacity that isn’t there at the moment.
“We can’t have a regulator on every building site during the construction, we just don’t have the capacity in the system for that level of oversight. So … we actually have to improve the competency and integrity of individuals, so they will perform better and produce more compliant buildings without having to be told to do so by a regulator at every turn.”
She told an ABC Four Corners program in August 2019 that there had been lack of oversight and “lack of competency, and sometimes, a lack of integrity,” in the building industry.
Legislation coming, slowly
Ms Weir told InnovationAus regulation is coming, but progress is slow. “There’s certainly a lot of noise, a lot of discussion, a lot of focus on the issues and the problems, a lot of talk about how to fix them.”
Victoria, for instance, has a Building Reform Expert Panel that is doing a holistic review and making recommendations to government.
This panel has just called for submissions regarding a framework for reform and improvements to Victoria’s building system. One of the key focus points of the panel is to protect consumers and improve confidence in the industry and regulators.
Changes resulting from the review will start to be implemented this year, but will take two years to culminate in a new Building Act in 2023.
Positive developments
In a further sign that progress is being made, Weir cited the work of the Australian Building Codes Board (ABCB), a joint initiative of all three levels of government formed in 1994. It is responsible for the development of the National Construction Code (NCC), which governs the construction of residential buildings in Australia.
“The ABCB team is creating, through extensive consultation, packages of work that the states and territories can have regard to when they introduce reforms,” Weir said.
“It was a fabulous decision of the ministers to create a resource in the ABCB, but it means they need to be allowed to do that, and to produce model guidance, model frameworks and so forth, which the states will hopefully use to undertake the reforms and implement any recommendations … they intend to implement.”
It is the Weir and Shergold Building Confidence Report – published in February 2018 with 24 recommendations designed to boost and enforce compliance with construction rules – which has helped underpin the ABCB’s approach.
The report was commissioned by the Building Ministers’ Forum (now the Building Ministers’ Meeting) comprising federal, state and territory ministers responsible for building and construction, in response to the Lacrosse Tower fire.
Digital transformation will drive competence
Boosting integrity and competence without close oversight might be difficult, but ‘survival of the fittest’ under the pressure of new legislation and digital transformation imperatives, could likely kill off smaller, less competent and less ethical players, especially opportunistic newcomers.
The Government in NSW has already significantly beefed up oversight of the construction industry with the appointment of David Chandler as NSW Building Commissioner and two pieces of legislation: the Residential Apartment Buildings (Compliance and Enforcement Powers) Act 2020, which came into force in September 2020, and the Design and Building Practitioners Act 2020 (D&BP Act), which comes into force on 1 July 2021.
In a January 2021 LinkedIn article, Mr Chandler said, to successfully navigate the landscape created by the new legislation, “construction professionals will need polish up their formal qualifications. They will also need to become digital ready…the digital construction market will be a game changing space from here on.
“An immature organisation will take at least five to seven years to invest in [and] reach a level of demonstrable, predictable maturity and stability.”
The InnovationAus webinar Building Reforms 2021 – The Quality Conversation, will dive into the industry’s perspectives on the impending changes. Weir will be joined by Professor Chris Bulmer, CEO, Institute of Quality Construction and CEO of Greenwich Associates, Ms Carrie Metcalfe, partner at Minter Ellison and Mr Andrew Hall, executive director and CEO, Insurance Council of Australia, alongside moderator and InnovationAus publisher, Corrie McLeod.
The Prime Minister Scott Morrison has committed a further $387 million to the massive Square Kilometre Array radio telescope in Western Australia’s Murchison region, including $64 million that will underwrite a new supercomputing centre.
The square kilometre array project, which was conceived in the 1990s and designed in the late 2010s, includes giant and coordinated radio telescope arrays built in both Western Australia and South Africa.
Mr Morrison says the latest investment, although part of Australia’s existing commitments to the project, “highlights that science and advanced manufacturing are at the heart of my government’s National Economic Recovery Plan from the COVID recession.”
More than 350 jobs would be created during the construction phase of the SKA, with a further 230 ongoing positions over the 50 year life of the project.
Blue Sky: An artist’s impression of the Square Kilometre Array
“The ambitions we have for manufacturing in this country is built on the vision we have for science and technology,” the Prime Minister said during a visit to the Pawsey Supercomputing Centre in Perth.
“Our investment in the construction and operations of the SKA will build our manufacturing capacity within the highly-skilled technology sector and enable major scientific breakthroughs to be made right here in Western Australia,” Mr Morrison said.
“The SKA will help our scientists make more discoveries than we can imagine today. Whether it’s better understanding the origin and future of our stars and galaxies to how gravity works across the universe.”
The SKA is an international collaboration between 16 member countries, including: Australia, Canada, China, France, Germany, India, Italy, Japan, Korea, the Netherlands, Portugal, South Africa, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland and the United Kingdom.
Australia will build and host the low-frequency part of the telescope (SKA-Low), which includes up to 131,072 individual SKA antennas, shaped like Christmas trees. The mid-frequency element (SKA-Mid) will be hosted by South Africa.
Global construction activities are expected to begin in the second half of this year, with work expected to begin in WA from early next year.
The newly-appointed Minister for Industry, Science and Technology Christian Porter said onshore processing of data – which is expected to be at the Pawsey Centre – presented opportunities for Australian organisations and scientists to build capability in managing vast data sets and extracting meaning.
The construction phase of the SKA was an opportunity for local SMEs, he said.
“Several Australian companies have already developed and manufactured components for the telescope prototypes and precursor telescopes,” Mr Porter said.
“This new investment will build on our $1.5 billion Modern Manufacturing Strategy and be a significant boost to the space sector, which is one of the strategy’s six priority sectors. It will strengthen our efforts to develop cutting edge industries with a global reach.
“As well as creating hundreds of local jobs, our economic modelling indicates the project will attract an estimated $1.8 billion in foreign income flows into Australia as a result of the SKA’s first 30 years of operations,” Mr Porter said.
“Our funding includes the provision of fibre-optic connectivity to communities near the SKA, which is at CSIRO’s Murchison Radioastronomy Observatory.
“This high-speed connection will support local economic development while reducing radio interference around the telescope.”
Australia is racing into the next decades of the digital era wilfully blind and ill-prepared as to the impact of algorithms on its citizens.
I say wilfully blind because notwithstanding the very serious concerns and legal challenges about algorithms around the world over many years, the current Digital Transformation Strategy 2025 and the recent APS Workforce Strategy 2025 contain no reference to algorithms.
Why is this a problem?
Because of the speed with which government agencies are acquiring and applying powerful algorithm technologies, while at the same time the political mantra of “fairness” has become the very raison d’être for their use.
Marie Johnson: Sleep walking into an algorithmic miasma
The widespread application of algorithms changes the relationship between the citizen and the state: opaque algorithms enabling policies of the reverse onus-of-proof and non-appealable processes that target and impact the most disadvantaged in society.
The unlawful RoboDebt debacle and the visceral outcry from disabled people and their families over proposed NDIS RoboPlans generated from outsourced Independent Assessments, demonstrates that government is ethically ill-equipped for the era of algorithms.
In 2020 in the United Kingdom, there was outrage and political fights over the use of “unfair algorithms” to make all sorts of government decisions.
Controversially, the use of opaque algorithms to calculate the grades of secondary school students disproportionally impacted disadvantaged students who were denied access to universities. This “provoked so much public anger at its perceived unfairness…that the government was forced into an embarrassing U-turn.”
But the socio-economic discrimination problems are far bigger for both Australia and the UK alike. The UN special rapporteur for extreme poverty, Philip Alston, warns that the UK is “stumbling zombie-like into a digital welfare dystopia”. Alston argued that too often technology is being used to reduce people’s benefits, set up intrusive surveillance and generate profits for private companies.
What can be done?
Twenty-five years ago, as “government online” was gearing up, governments around the world undertook “forms and transactions” audits as a pillar of their online strategies. At the time, the Victorian Government was a globally recognised leader in government online. I undertook a number of these forms and transactions audits myself, and there is a whole other story to be told about what these audits revealed about the bowels of government.
The reason why the forms and transactions audits were undertaken, was to establish a baseline and priority for online delivery. For the first time, these audits established transparency as to the impact on citizens and business of their interactions across government.
Now twenty-five years later, given the magnitude of the impact of algorithms on citizens and democracy more broadly, a similar audit of algorithms is urgently needed.
The Stanford University Report “Government by Algorithm” cautioned that “little attention has been devoted to how agencies acquire such tools in the first place or oversee their use.” The Stanford report advocated that the US Federal administration undertake a “a rigorous canvass of AI use at the 142 most significant federal departments, agencies, and sub-agencies”. That is, an audit of algorithms.
It beggars belief that two of the most significant capability strategies in government (the Digital Transformation Strategy and the APS Workforce Strategy 2025), are devoid of any reference to algorithms. An algorithm audit would fundamentally change both of these.
Without this, it is impossible to understand the additive impact of algorithms on citizens and businesses, or the depth of policy skills and ethics required of the public sector. Or the forms of public scrutiny that are even possible by civil society.
In fact, in 2017 ABC News reported that it wrote to 11 Australian government departments responsible for administering legislation with computerised decision-making, asking what decisions the computers are making.
“The short answer is: we don’t know.”
We don’t know – but we may very well be shocked.
Application for grants. Application for Trade Marks. Job applications.
The ABC also reported that “the most recent new powers for automated decision-making apply to the departments of Health and Veterans Affairs.
“The Department of Veterans Affairs (DVA) is undertaking veteran centric reform to significantly improve services for veterans and their families by re-engineering DVA business processes.”
With this reform, there is concern that veterans may end up facing flawed processes similar to those implemented by Centrelink.
These concerns might be justified, given the disability sector-wide outrage over safety and human rights impacts of the proposed NDIS RoboPlans.
Stuart Robert, who retains significant influence over service delivery and digital transformation, described “the kind of transformation the government wants is its approach not just to the NDIS but also Veterans Affairs and Aged Care.”
All this would involve algorithms. Access determined by facial biometric algorithms; plans generated by algorithms; funding determined by algorithms; debt determined by algorithms; and the potential control of payments by blockchain algorithms.
The situation at present, is that there is no transparency, knowledge of or governance around the use and sharing of algorithms by government agencies in Australia.
Compounding this and of grave concern is the new intergovernmental agreement on data-sharing, which expands the sharing of data between public and private sector organisations.
The additive impact of bias on citizens from the use and sharing of algorithms across agencies, across jurisdictions and across sectors will be unfathomable. Pre-emptive legal challenges will take place, as happened in the UK.
So there should be a detente on the use and planning of algorithms until an audit of algorithms is done.
Fairness can only come from transparency, a duty of care and the active governance of ethics.
Visionary businesses in Australia are starting to plan for real-time action (and reactions) – from products or service delivery to responding to market disruptions.
At Verizon, we are having conversations at all levels of enterprise and government about how organisations can deploy private 5G alongside their current 4G options, to build networks that can respond at levels previously unheard of.
Businesses are realising that scalable, reliable networking is a key foundation to innovate, grow and prosper.
Public 5G networks are starting to roll out in Australia, but access to 5G spectrum is a practical inhibitor for most organisations looking to deploy their own 5G networks. While other countries are more advanced in their public 5G journeys, we are seeing fewer opportunities in that space locally.
Derek Fittler: The 5G future sets up opportunities across multiple industries
However, the option to build private 4G networks with the view to switching to 5G once spectrum becomes available, will become an attractive option as CIOs build infrastructure to accommodate a 5G-enabled future.
Trusted networks to enable cyber resilience
The main use cases for private 4G/5G networks are to embed enterprise-grade cyber resilience into business systems within established buildings or premises that were not built with connectivity in mind.
A good example is campus-based enterprises and governments that are grappling with remote workers under lock-down conditions and facing morale issues for employees.
Verizon is helping a number of organisations address the challenge of connectivity within concrete structures and buildings, or at remote locations where high-speed networks are not available. We are working alongside partners to deliver enterprise-grade secured high-speed networks to alleviate these issues.
Delivering on more than speed
Private enterprise networks can work alongside fibre networks (such as NBN options), but when you consider the eight currencies of 5G, it’s not just about delivering fast speed or downloads, but how your organisation can move into a fully digital operation.
Private 5G networks can bring that focus to the enterprise to realise benefits that aren’t easily delivered via public 5G options.
This includes computing “at the edge of the network” by reducing latency over network infrastructure.
On its own, edge computing enables faster, localised processing. Combine it with 5G and you have the architecture for a next-gen wireless network that can empower operations essentially in real time.
5G + edge = real-time mobile edge
Mobile edge computing (MEC) is the widely accepted standard of edge computing that places compute and storage resources at the edge of the network, close to end-users. A complementary technology for 5G, it provides both an IT service environment and cloud computing capabilities at the edge of the mobile network.
5G will pave the way to optimise for services that are latency sensitive, and should provide massive bandwidth, data transfer rates many times faster than the blink of an eye, and greater connectivity and reliability than 4G LTE.
Solving real-world challenges
Everything from manufacturing equipment and smart cities applications to connected vehicles and wearables will be clamouring for 5G’s ability to deliver on a fully realised digital outcome.
Verizon is working with a large organisation in Australia to upgrade connectivity for trainees that live and work at campus locations across the nation.
Each year, the organisation provides training for thousands of new employees, but when COVID hit, they were unable to access the internet for work or personal use apart from on their mobile devices on data plans.
Being unable to connect with family and friends had a detrimental impact on wellbeing, and the organisation found employee retention plummeted.
While using mobile data options to connect with others provided a short-term solution, over the long term the organisation was concerned about high costs and security issues. Running fibre through the organisation also presented a major capital works program.
The organisation is planning to deploy Verizon’s private 5G network to deliver training programs for employees and an enterprise communications platform to deliver instructions on maintenance and support of high-tech equipment – all via remote means.
Enabling smart cities
5G networks coupled with MEC power will also benefit smart city initiatives, where existing infrastructure needs to be considered when implementing upgraded connectivity options. For these initiatives, 5G and MEC-powered solutions enable communities to capture, analyse and distribute video content in real time. Smart cities are also using these technologies to provide hyper-accurate area mapping to aid with delivery services and emergency response.
Other disaster responses can use remote control miniature robots to aid citizen engagement via public Wi-Fi access. In other countries, we have helped services teams use aggregate data from deployed personnel, body-attached or unattended sensors, and autonomous agents to assist in search and rescue or disaster response.
Bringing processing to the edge is an interesting conversation that we are having on many levels. For example, by moving performance and compute to the edge, an emergency responder organisation will achieve faster response times and put more power into the hands of its emergency personnel on the ground.
In mining applications or at natural disaster sites, as another example, we can turn hostile environments into real-world images to protect, inform and enhance decisions.
Helping nomadic communities
Verizon worked with a Port Authority in the UK to solve an issue of delivering connectivity to sailors that are locked on their ship in port. Not only is localised, secure connectivity a morale booster, it also enables technology coverage when in port. This enables flow-on efficiencies and enhanced productivity such as virtual training, maintenance and other duties while on a trusted network connection.
Industrial applications
There are opportunities for industrial applications of computing at the edge of the network, powered by 5G. 5G is expected to be capable of supporting up to 1 million devices in a square kilometre and to spur a radical increase in the number of connected devices and systems, leading to the Massive IoT (MIoT).
By 2025, some 38.6 billion devices are forecast to be connected worldwide, and by 2030 it’s projected that there will be 50 billion, according to Statistica’s “Internet of Things (IoT) in the U.S.”
MIoT deployments could generate and harness large volumes of data to drive advanced analytical and artificial intelligence (AI) programs and provide mission-critical services that require Ultra Reliable Low Latency Communication (URLLC) services.
For applications such as precision manufacturing, MEC and 5G can enable fully connected and automated factories to detect issues in near real time, potentially reducing error rates, increasing productivity, and paving the way for real-time manufacturing.
And finally, 5G and MEC could amplify three key technologies that will transform logistics—IoT performance tracking, robotics, and distribution automation—to enable just-in-time production and improve tracking, delivery and package movement.
Society is arriving at a new frontier, one where technology empowers humans to reimagine how they experience the world around them. As 5G continues to be deployed, its potential becomes ever clearer—and as the innovators profiled in Speed of Thought demonstrate, more essential.
Derek Fittler is the Managing Client Partner at Verizon Business Group in Australia. Verizon has produced a documentary on how 5G can help a range of industries – watch Speed of Thought on how creative visionaries are exploring 5G to help solve seemingly insurmountable problems.
