PRIME MINISTER: Thanks very much, I’m thrilled that Simon you were able to fend off the evil demo god that comes whenever I see a live technology demonstration mate I always know that something will go wrong but you did that very well. Look congratulations to Ben, to Rosie, to Simon and all of your team on this innovative piece of financial technology. Thank you very much too to Bloomberg for hosting us here today and of course, Angus Taylor. Angus is one the sharpest minds and most distinguished economists in the Parliament. I have to say that jumpiter has never had a better trumpeter than you. Of course Wyatt Roy who is the Assistant Minister for Innovation working with Christopher Pyne on the new innovation portfolio, the industry, innovation and science portfolio and that is as Ben has noted an absolutely key part of our agenda. It is absolutely necessary part of our agenda. You know there is no question that if we are to remain a high wage, generous social welfare net first world economy we must be more innovative, we must be more competitive, we must be more productive. You see every day greater opportunities opening up for Australians and Australian businesses. The conclusion of the Trans Pacific Partnership yesterday in Atlanta is just another example of the increased opportunities opening up to us and the way we access them is with innovation and imagination, the way we access them is with confidence and entrepreneurship .And the people like yourselves, Ben and Rosie and your colleagues and the rest of the entrepreneurs in the room are absolutely critical elements in this. You play an indispensable role in our country’s future. As I said, we simply will not remain a high wage generous social welfare net economy unless we are able to seize these opportunities and they are in abundance. Now this requires obviously support for start-ups. I just don’t mean Government support for start-ups that exists. We need to support start-ups more effectively and we also need to encourage support from the rest of the economy, the rest of the private sector as well. Like Angus I’ve started many businesses over the years. Some have done well, some have sort of washed their face if you don’t look too hard, some have died slowly, some have been wipe outs, but you know something, you learn from all of them. So what’s the point I’m trying to make there, culture. Culture is important. It is important in organisations, it’s important in countries, in nations. A culture of entrepreneurship and innovation means that we understand that lack of success is a learning experience. We understand we don’t go into meltdown if a project doesn’t work. What we do is we learn from that and we try again. We keep ourselves as far as we can always in always in (inaudible) stage. So if we’re a politician, a Minister or a Prime Minister and somebody says ‘you know minister do you guarantee this policy will work?’ Because we are an agile Government we say, ‘we guarantee this is the best policy idea we have at the moment that we can afford. If it can be improved we will improve it, if it doesn’t work, we’ll try something else if it does work and there are features of its success that can be applied in other areas we will do so.’ In other words stay on the balls of your feet. Agility is absolutely critical.
What is the single most, well perhaps not the single most but one of the most distinguishing features of our time it is increased volatility and that’s whether you look at the (inaudible) or whether you look at the pace of change across the world whether you look at it from a geo political point of view or whether you look at it from a technology economic point of view. Increased volatility; rapid disruption of the type that Angus was talking about. So what do you do? Do you hide under the doona? No. You say volatility is my friend. I will take advantage of that because it creates more opportunities.
Now let me tell you about a couple of things we’re doing in the Government that will enable us to better deal with these opportunities in the future. The first thing is some time ago I, we set up and it’s in my department, it’s now in Prime Minister and Cabinet, a digital transformation office and this is modelled on agencies and other jurisdictions in particular the government digital services in the UK and its goal is to ensure that all government services of any consequence in terms of numbers any substantial interaction with the public are able to be transacted end to end digitally that’s to say from a smart phone typically by 2017. Now that’s a goal that’s not a promise I hasten to add, we’re working as fast as we can but the aim is to deliver genuinely digital government.
Why is that important? Firstly it will enable customers, citizens to get a better service. It’ll enable them to transact with government in the same way they transact with this business, with ‘On Market’ with Commonwealth Bank with big retailers here and around the world. In other words you’re using the channel that people prefer.
Secondly it will make government and the people, the businesses and individuals that deal with it, it will enable them to become more efficient. Now it’s very important that governments are more efficient, not just to save costs. In fact my approach to the digital transformation agenda is don’t worry about the cost savings. The cost savings will follow, they will fall-out, don’t waste time calculating them – focus on the customer, focus on getting the right service to the customer.
Now if you make governments more efficient you are making a third of the economy more efficient. We all have a vested interest in the public sector being more efficient and being able to deliver to the customer better and the key thing is focus on the customer.
Finally I just make, I make another observation – we have a big open data agenda. Now there are obviously some categories of government data that cannot be made available via an open API for security reasons. There are others where there are big privacy concerns but generally data that belongs to the government should be, all other things being equal and subject to those qualifications, should be available to be used by developers by the public in a creative and innovative way, as and you see some fantastic examples of that – we have put an enormous about of geospatial data made it open just since the election of the Abbott Government in 2013. Most of that, much of that has come through I have to say through the leadership from my Secretary and now acting Chief of Staff Drew Clarke who of course is a surveyor and was Secretary of the Communications Department. So we’re very focused on that.
I’ll give you one example just to close with this just to think of the critical importance of open data. Many of you would use TripView, I’m sure, which tells you when the bus is coming, if the 10:10 bus is five minutes late it will tell you if it’s five minutes early it will tell you. What that does that live running data was made available by the NSW Government to developers and there are many other applications comparable. What that does is at zero cost or little or no cost to government, dramatically increase the amenity of public transport because you don’t have to worry about waiting at the station or waiting at the bus stop, you know when the bus or the train or the ferry is going to come. You don’t need to be fiddling around with a paper timetable.
With one stroke increases the amenity and the ridership of mass transit which is obviously you know a public policy objective of the State Government. And there are so many other examples. I don’t know if any of you have been familiar with the innovation in the geospatial area. This is a massive area of innovative Australian technologies which of course rely upon government provided, government assembled geospatial data being made available. So open data is a very big part of it.
Ladies and gentlemen our Government is committed to an innovative, an innovative Australia. An innovation Nation. We need to be constantly agile, constantly looking at the way we can improve how we do things whether we are a start-up like this one or whether we are a business that’s been around for a hundred years. It is the culture that delivers success in the times in which we live and I’m very confident that we have all the qualities as a Nation to be more and more successful in these, the most exciting times in human history.
Thank you very much.
Questions and answers - OnMarket launch, Sydney
E&OE…
Ben Buckland: Thanks Andrew. I think you can see what an amazing job Webchem, our development team, led by Larry Adler and Andrew Crow, have done in pulling all the information that you need to make an informed investment decision if you’re a self-managed super fund. So there’ll be people looking for research, there’ll be people looking for understanding of who they’re investing with and now they can do it directly from their phone. So there’s $600 billion in self-managed super, we’re looking to basically open up that amount of money for companies who are looking to grow in Australia.
Carden Calder: We have time for one more question for Ben [inaudible].
Prime Minister: Can I just make a comment on that just in relation to Ben and more of a technology/commercial comment. The brilliance of this application is simply that it makes it easier to buy. It makes it easier to trade. If you want to sell something, make it easier for your customers to find you to reach you, to transact with you and that’s the exactly what you’ve done. So it will inevitably, this application and no doubt others that will seek to emulate you or compete with you, will open up the market, the investor market considerably.
Ben Buckland: Thanks Prime Minister. Yes we’ll definitely set up your profile [laughter]
Prime Minister: [Inaudible] I encourage everyone else [laughter]..
Carden Calder: Jennifer Hewett from the Financial Review.
Jennifer Hewett: Prime Minister, the Cameron Government in the UK has done a lot to encourage a strong financial [Inaudible].. to encourage a vibrant fintech sector cluster in Sydney.
Prime Minister: Well, yeah, in Sydney. I’m the Prime Minister of Australia. [Laughter]
Sydney is not the capital of Australia but look that’s a very good question and I see Mark Johnson there who’s had a bit to say about this area in the past. We’re looking at all of these aspects Jenny. The tax system is the biggest set of levers that the Federal Government has to incentivise business and of course and indeed, if it’s wrongly or sub optimally designed if you like, to disincentivise business. So we’re looking at all of those features but I agree, I’ve always felt that Australia should be more of a financial, it should be a bigger financial centre than it is. We do have the advantage of being in the same time zone, there is a strong argument – I’ve always found it pretty convincing – that technology has annihilated longitudinal distance if not latitudinal distance if you’re in the same time zone and you can talk to people you know in the same part of the day. You know you’re pretty much connected nowadays so there are powerful arguments in favour of us being bigger. We have the huge advantage obviously of a gigantic, you know relative to the size of our overall economy, a gigantic superannuation industry, a gigantic funds management industry and that is an enormous base upon which to build. We’ve got very strong financial regulation, prudential regulation, we’ve got some of the best banks in the world by any measure so there’s a you know a first-class legal system. We’ve got everything going for us here. I mean in our part of the world we’ve got all of the same features, [Inaudible] scale, that London has. All of those points except our banks have done a lot better that the British ones, but you know good regulation and a good legal system, savings, these are very big assets for Australia.
Carden Calder: Thank you, the next question is from Ticky Fullerton from the ABC and then I think we’re out of time, I’m afraid.
Ticky Fullerton: Prime Minister, I’m just wondering what hope that some [inaudible] get in on this?
Prime Minister: Get in on this?
Ticky Fullerton: OnMarket. Now as a former managing director, Chairman of Goldman Sachs, what do you think this is going to do to the investment banking industry? Could it make life a lot cheaper for companies to raise funds?
Prime Minister: Well, you’re asking me for a financial opinion which I’ll just think about for a moment and then I’ll give it to you.
[laughter]
Look, the history of technology in financial services is that it has made price discovery much more efficient and much more immediate, obviously. And that has reduced spreads in every market as we know and it has, it’s made markets more efficient. It’s given much more power in terms of access to information to the you know to the individual investor whether it’s a self-managed super fund that might have some millions of dollars or might have tens of millions of dollars to invest or a medium sized institution or indeed a you know individual just investing their savings. I think all of these technologies do put pressure on prices and the you know the people in the financial services sector are constantly having to work harder to justify the charges that they make but I think this is good. The more competition, the more power you give to the individual, to the consumer in this case. The consumers obviously can be big – I don’t mean retail investors – but consumers can be customers if you like, the more power you can give to the customer the better.
My experience, over what in some respects regrettably quite a long time [Inaudible] the online world is that you will find if you look at the history of it that invariably the applications which offer people the most choice succeed. You know if you go back many years when AOL added walled guarded content you may recall and they were very confident about that and so was Wall Street. Completely wrong. People wanted the freedom of accessing the whole internet. Any application that offers people more choice or more freedom is going to do better. Which is one of the reasons, one of the reasons why, despite the fact that we’re you know we don’t necessarily get every policy right at every time, the fundamental values of the Liberal Party and indeed the Liberal National Party are the right ones for our time because they are in focus, boiled down to the fundamental DNA values of freedom and choice and individual enterprise and those are the values that are reflected in the online world because the more choice you give people, the more freedom you give people, the more likely they will transact with you.
Thanks very much.