Roundtable ignores the most urgent leak in our productivity pipeline

Every year, more than 200,000 Australians slip through the departure gates. Among them are some of our brightest minds, lured by the glittering promise of opportunity overseas. The three most brilliant people I know? One landed at Oxford before launching a med-tech start-up with Silicon Valley backing. Another joined an AI speech-recognition firm in New York and casually talks about Mars as his next career move. I married the third one, and even that may not be enough to convince her to stick around.

This month’s Productivity Commission roundtable is Jim Chalmers’ chance to take his reform agenda for a spin. While the roundtable will toy with a transitional GST rebate and the ACTU’s four-day fantasy, it will ignore the most urgent leak in our productivity pipeline: the innovators.

If you’re in the start-up game, it’s no shock that your sights are set on the US. The gravitational pull of Silicon Valley or New York, where ambition rubs shoulders with billion-dollar ideas, is hard to resist. But we know money talks. The US venture capital market is a $2 trillion juggernaut – nearly 300 times the size of Australia’s $6 billion pool. When the funding gap is that wide, it’s no wonder our brightest minds are boarding flights instead of building empires at home.

We shouldn’t forget the young professionals in industries like investment banking, management consulting and law who will soon relieve themselves of client calls and corporate hierarchies. Lockstep progression and conservative cultures have dissuaded them from aiming higher on the corporate ladder. Many of them will look to build globally, instead of climbing locally.

Tim Fung famously traded investment banking for Airtasker, the go-to platform for gig work. Jane Lu’s transition from EY to global fashion stardom with Showpo is also well known. It’s a miracle we held on to either of them, unlike Andrew Lacy, who ditched McKinsey to eventually start up health tech company Prenuvo in the US.

More young professionals are leaving Australia each year. These bright minds aren’t just chasing higher pay and lower taxes abroad, they’re chasing ecosystems that actually move. If we’re not careful, their next Eureka moment will be in Manhattan, not Melbourne.

Next week’s roundtable must link productivity to people, especially the next generation of innovators. The roundtable will convene to discuss productivity, economic resilience and budget sustainability. Although important issues, none will directly address the brain drain.

Meanwhile, the European Innovation Council Accelerator is handing founders up to $4 million in grant funding and $16 million in blended financing. An even shorter haul to Singapore will get our innovators fast-tracked support through co-investment schemes. Australia offers a patchwork quilt of grants and red tape.

Despite a need to supplement our local reserves, our approach to attracting global talent is equally anaemic. Canada’s Global Skills Strategy promises two-week visa approvals for high-demand tech professionals. New Zealand offers a three-year visa for entrepreneurs building global impact. These programs are fast and clear and they are aligned with national innovation goals. Australia’s migration settings, on the other hand, are slow and opaque and often misaligned with the sectors we claim to champion.

And if you’re looking for the ultimate incentive, Dubai’s zero corporate tax for small businesses and no personal income tax is hard to beat. Australia, to its credit, does offer a generous R&D tax incentive to start-ups and it will be considering lowering the corporate tax rate at the roundtable. Labor’s slashing of HECS debt by 20 per cent is also a significant leg-up for young professionals. But Australians still face some of the highest personal tax rates in the OECD, with little relief in sight. If we want to retain our talent, we need more than a roundtable.

I often wonder what it would take for an Aussie to uproot their life and head for colder, costlier pastures abroad. We live in a secular, sun-drenched country where you can walk barefoot through Woolies and catch each sunset twice – once in real life, and again on your Instagram feed.

Of all the bright minds I know, the one thing I consistently hear is that they’ll all be back by the time they want to raise a family. But by then, it may be too late. We need them back before they burn out or build empires elsewhere. We need them in their prime, with the urgency and energy to fix the problems that riddle Australia and turn our natural advantages into global ones.

We are truly lucky in Australia. We are the sixth-largest country in the world and we are entirely protected by sea. Australia has some of the most valuable critical mineral reserves known to man. We also have $4.2 trillion assets in our superannuation pool, on track to become the second largest in the world. Yet the International Institute for Management Development’s World Competitiveness Rankings put us at 68th in entrepreneurship and 60th in workforce productivity.

We call it the lucky country, but luck runs out. Unless we build a system that rewards risk and retains brilliance, we’ll keep watching our future take off from the departure lounge.

Tushaar Garg is a Sydney corporate lawyer and a former political staffer for the Labor Party.

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