ADDRESS TO THE NATIONAL TECH SUMMIT-CHRIS MINNS
SYDNEY TOWN HALL
TUESDAY, 16 SEPTEMBER 2025
G’day everybody. Thanks so much, friends. Thanks for having me in this beautiful Town Hall on the land of the Gadigal people.
And before I begin in this room where generations of new Australians have taken their pledge as citizens of Australia, in an industry that relies disproportionately on the talent of Asian and South Asian Australians, can I say, particularly to Indian Australians over the last few weeks, that you will always be welcome in New South Wales.
I want to make it really clear that Australia needs you, the tech sector needs you, and this is your home as much as it is anybody else’s.
Friends, can I thank the Tech Council for having today to the CEO, my friend Damian Kassabgi, to the board led by Scott Farquhar.
I’m giving this speech in the shadow of Scott’s address to the National Press Club, where he quoted, amongst other things, some homework he wrote as an 11-year-old in 1991.
And that homework predicted that in the future, adults will no longer get up at all hours of the morning to go to work.
Instead, they’ll wake up and walk over to the home computer. Anything that they would need on that computer would be there.
There would be no supermarkets. Instead, people will be able to write out a shopping list and order it over a machine. Prescient words.
But can I say, Scott, we were very different kinds of kids, and it’s one of the main reasons why I’m no billionaire, friends.
But there’s a second line from the speech that I did want to respond to this afternoon, which I think is important.
In that speech, Scott made the interesting point that when he gave his last big lecture 10 years prior, he said what we needed was government to get out of the way, but today, we need to partner with government to pave the way.
It’s a different vision of the future.
What he’s describing there is a big change, and in my experience, governments have been on a very similar journey.
15 years ago, when some prominent tech companies were talking about moving fast and breaking things. I’m sure some people in government were spooked.
We should be careful about breaking important things.
But on the other side of the fence, there was clearly truth in the common and widely held criticism of government, that bureaucracy could be slow, inward looking and its primary effect is blocking good ideas before they ever got off the ground.
We shouldn’t be defensive here. One of the big revelations since coming to office, for me, is how many of those rules are about defending the interests of often established incumbents, in a way that is, and it feels, deeply conservative.
We’ve seen that most especially in the marketplace of New South Wales, when it comes to housing, it’s the most consequential example.
I think you’d agree, Sydney is a beautiful city.
But in addition to being beautiful, it’s the second most expensive city in the world after Hong Kong.
As a result, we are losing twice as many young people every year as we get back in return. And that’s taking into account the fact that Sydney takes the majority of new inbound migrants from around the world.
Listen to some of these statistics. Last year, an extra 40,000 young people left Sydney in the prime of their working lives.
Most of those people were in the core demographic of tech companies in terms of recruitment.
Now we have had interstate migration before in Australia, but it’s generally been older Australians moving north for warmer weather.
That situation has flipped, and we’re now losing our brightest and our best young people, moving to different locations.
And we don’t know what those people would do in the prime of their lives. Starting companies, joining firms and businesses, or perhaps coaching football or cricket teams and becoming president of the local P&C.
My point here is that it’s a housing crisis that’s hurting everyone and it’s smashing into the tech sector in particular.
People say it’s a complex problem and it is to a point but there is a simple issue here, and that is, that we’re not building in this state, and we haven’t built these homes because we’ve made construction far too difficult.
There are some parts of Sydney close to the city in the most desirable places to live on Earth, where council regulations have effectively, functionally, banned new housing.
A couple of weeks ago, we made a decision against the protest of some of those councils, to finish off the old Woollahra train station and build 10,000 new homes around it.
This is a local government area just three kilometres from the city, where the population has actually fallen in the past 50 years, whilst the population of greater Sydney has risen by 70%.
We want to change things, then we do need to confront that NIMBY mentality.
We’ve got to change the rules to ensure that housing can flourish.
That’s why we created a body last year called the Housing Delivery Authority, with the power to come in over the top of councils and cut through bureaucratic layers and make informed, but decisive decisions.
It’s why earlier this month, we began using artificial intelligence in the housing process to speed up approval times, and it’s having an impact.
Some of our tardiest or slowest councils are now up the top. So is the Department of Planning in New South Wales, precisely because we’re using new ways of dealing with development applications, particularly artificial intelligence.
So our attitude to regulation is unapologetic.
If regulation is doing more harm than good, we need to get rid of it. If bureaucracy is getting in the way of social progress, we’ve got to cast it aside.
And if there’s a way to use new technology to help with that process, then governments need to be on the leading edge of embracing it, not a lagged.
So far, those changes are starting to make a difference for housing. We’re seeing approvals massively increase alongside quicker times for assessment.
And we decided to do the same for big commercial developments too, through the Investment Delivery Authority, which was based on the HDA, the Housing Delivery Authority.
In Scott’s Press Club speech, he made a persuasive case that data centres would power the 21st Century in the same way coal and steam powered the Industrial Revolution.
He also made the case that Australia is sitting on serious advantages, including abundant land, skilled workers, and, of course, our stable democracy.
Global investment in these centres will exceed $6.7 trillion by the end of the decade.
Our only issue is we’ve been handicapping ourselves by making the process too difficult and the projects way too long.
We need the IDA to sweep through the system and to make those billion dollar projects like data centres to come to fruition, guiding them through the planning process.
As Daniel Mookhey announced yesterday, we’re about to open the application process, and if you’re sitting on one of these projects, we want you to put your hat in the ring, we want you to apply.
We’d love you to see how my government, our government, New South Wales can help, rather than hurt or frustrate attempts to grow firms and businesses in Australia’s largest state.
The tech sector is already a pillar of the Australian economy. 20 unicorns in 20 years, a full 9% of our economic output, and it employs a million workers.
But if we’re completely honest with ourselves and we factor in all of our advantages, I don’t think we’re where we could be.
Every country in the world is trying to muscle in on the same market, and we are, as the Tech Council has repeatedly said, a full percentage behind the OECD in research and development funding.
Our global share of patents has fallen by the equivalent of about 20% in a very short space of time.
I don’t want you to think that I’m talking this down. I think we’re ready to explode, but we need to find more effective ways to bring capital in so that founders, entrepreneurs, first movers, don’t have to fly overseas to meet their potential, to follow their dreams.
That’s why I’m a massive fan of the Tech Council’s idea to unlock more superannuation investment in Australia tech businesses.
Holding $4 trillion, it’s the fourth biggest pool of retirement funds in the world. And in the next decades, it’s on track to overtake Canada and the UK, which would make it the second biggest.
It’s a huge amount of money, but currently, our rules are limiting their investment in venture capital, even though emerging startups produce amazing returns, almost double the ASX 300 over the last two decades.
So I think this is something we should absolutely be looking at. I hope the federal government is doing just that.
We’ve got the capital sitting there. We have the local companies looking to scale up.
We’ve got world leading universities and an investment and technology marketplace that’s already been established, we just need to bring them together so that everyone can win.
There’s also an equity issue. Why can’t mum and dad investors have access to the returns and opportunities of technology while backing Aussie innovation?
The final point I wanted to make here is about Tech Central. Now the Innovation Minister will have more to say about this tomorrow, I want to leave everyone in no doubt that the government’s performance and vision.
We want to see that hive of activity around Central. We want to see those agglomeration effects that occur when different firms work side by side with each other.
And we want to see industry and government, as well as universities, bouncing ideas of each other and getting better in the process.
If there’s – and I believe there is – a leadership role for government here, it’s bringing all the different groups together, even if it’s made easier through geography and our land use planning changes.
We want to make sure that we’re on the same page here.
We’re on board, and we want the Tech Central to be a massive success.
And if that means taking a leadership role, being guided by the Tech Council as well as those big firms. Well, we’re here to help, not getting away.
Friends, you may or may not have clocked this, but yesterday was the 25th anniversary of Sydney Olympic Opening Ceremony.
Looking back it was a wonderful time, where we showed our best face to the world.
We were competitive, but welcoming.
Cosmopolitan, but incredibly proud.
Victorious, but also fair.
Tourists fell in love with us and realised what an amazing community had been built here.
It’s for all those same reasons, the reasons people around the world want to live in Sydney and Australia, the reason we were just voted the best city in the world to visit by Conde Nast magazine – incidentally, the first time since those Olympic Games – that we are in a pole position to win the next generation of tech opportunities.
We believe we’ve got people. We’ve got the university. We’ve got global, scale-up firms. We’ve produced global juggernauts. We’ve developed the ecosystem.
Sydney is already one of the great cities on earth, but there’s absolutely no reason they can’t be one of the great tech centres too. Thanks so much. I’m sure this will be a very important and enjoyable conference.
