July 30, 2025 • 15 mins
We talk a lot about artificial intelligence, about how businesses can use AI to improve productivity, and the challenges in navigating a period of significant disruption. But in terms of the opportunity for Australia, we’re only just scratching the surface.
Now, one of this country’s most respected tech leaders has used a National Press Club address to lay out exactly how big the potential is - and what the government needs to do to get us there.
Scott Farquhar - co-founder of Atlassian, and the chair of the Tech Council of Australia - talks to Sean Aylmer about Atlassian, the future, and why AI is our chance to 'change the global pecking order'.
Find out more: https://fearandgreed.com.au/
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Sean Aylmer (00:05):
Welcome to the Fear and Greed Business Interview. I'm Sean Aylmer.
We talk a lot about artificial intelligence, about how businesses
can use AI to improve productivity, and the challenges in
navigating a period of significant disruption, but in terms of
the opportunity for Australia, we're only just scratching the surface now.
One of this country's most respected tech leaders has used
a National Press Club address to lay out exactly how
(00:28):
big the potential is and what the government needs to
do to get us there. Scott Farquhar is the Co-Founder
of Atlassian and the chair of the Tech Council of Australia. Scott,
welcome to Fear and Greed.
Scott Farquhar (00:39):
I'm so glad to be here.
Sean Aylmer (00:41):
How big is the prize? The AI Prize?
Scott Farquhar (00:44):
Well, I want to take you back a little bit
in terms of history. When you look at humans as
builders of tools, all the advances have come when you
can really work out new ways to use energy to
advance human civilisation. So, we used wind and water to
mill grain. We used coal to power steam and eventually steel.
We used oil to power our cars and our planes.
(01:08):
And at each of those junctures when we used energy
for a more advanced usage, like it really propelled everything
we could do as a species. And we are now
at a moment in time when we can now use
energy to do knowledge work. And so whilst we've got
used to using energy to replace us plowing in a field,
(01:29):
we will eventually get used to you know knowledge, you know,
kind of using energy to replace a call center worker,
you know, answering the same call or the same request
day in, day out. And so in these moments of
time you have an opportunity to change the global pecking order.
And when also, you know, small advantages early on can
compound into big advantages over time. And so we'll say
(01:53):
two examples. One is the industrial revolution. So the UK
had accessible coal deposits, but of course they can use
to build you know, railways and steal and then the
railways made the next coal deposits even cheaper, which then
was a virtuous cycle, and of course that eventually led
to the building of their navy, you know, with steam
and steel, which led to an empire you know, for
(02:15):
one hundred and fifty years. And while that seems a
long time ago. If we take the example of Singapore,
Singapore went from you know, what would be argued a
sort of colonial you know, swampland you know, a century
or so ago to a country that's now sort of
a world power. And if you look at that, in
just in my lifetime, forty five years, Singapore has taken
(02:38):
advantage of containerships and you know, contanierships were a new technology,
and Singapore bet behind them, betting on ports and making
sure they had a stable rule of law and you know,
an advantageous business environment and as a result, they are
now the second largest port in the world. And again
that was from a small advantage that has compounded over
the last fifty years. And over that same time period
(03:00):
they've gone from forty per cent, give or take, of
the US's GDP per capita to one hundred and twenty
five percent of the US's GDP per capita. And so
in just you know, well, I think forty five years
is my lifetime, not a long time, they have kind of lapped the
US in productivity. And so I think about all that
and think the AI opportunity is a huge chance for
(03:20):
Australia to you know, rewrite the scoreboard in terms of
global trade. And that's the opportunity ahead of us.
Sean Aylmer (03:28):
So what's the Australian equivalent to ports or to coal?
Scott Farquhar (03:33):
So Singapore had some natural advantages, obviously a port, but
they were one of five ports in that particular region
of the world that could have become large. They had a
stable rule of law. They progressively attracted businesses. And if
we look at our advantages in Australia, let's just take
the data center opportunity for us, the ability to build
data centers to host computers, for the region and for
(03:55):
the world. A couple. First, we're you know, in a great region,
you know, which is the Asia Pacific region and Southeast
Asia region, which is actually reasonably large and growing when
it comes to computer usage. And so a statistic there
is that there are more users of ChatGPT between Indonesia
and Vietnam than there are in the US, so we're
(04:18):
close to that. We have abundant talent in terms of
our raw talent, we have access to green and renewable energy,
we have abundant raw materials, you know, if we want
to build concrete and steel to house these data centers.
We've got a stable rule of law, which is important
when people are looking to put these huge capital investments.
(04:40):
And lastly, you know, we, in this time of geopolitically uncertainty,
we have access to chips, you know, high speed chips
that many other countries don't have access to, and so
all of that are our raw natural advantages. And what
we need to do is press this early advantage by
really aggressively investing to sort of build those compound benefits
(05:02):
over time.
Sean Aylmer (05:04):
At the Press Club yesterday, you were talking about the
government needing to pave the way. Previously, maybe twenty years ago,
you were talking about the government getting out of the way.
What does the government need to do now to enable
private sector public markets to take advantage of what you're
talking about?
Scott Farquhar (05:22):
There are two areas I look out that the government
could really have a big impact. One is the data
center opportunity, and that is private capital largely, so we
don't need the government to provide capital here. What we
do need is for them to change copyright laws. In
twenty fourteen, the Law Reform Commission recommended changes to Australian
copyright laws. In twenty sixteen, the Productivity Commission, and the
(05:45):
reason for that is that our copyright laws are out
of step with the rest of the world, and so
that's holding and preventing a wad of large players from
putting their models here in Australia.
Sean Aylmer (05:55):
Just dig into that a little bit. So is this
because large language models can't access the information? I'm not
quite sure where you're going on the copyright laws.
Scott Farquhar (06:03):
Yes, let me go through that. In copyright law, it can be quite niche and esoteric.
And so that's a very valid question and I'm not
the best expert at this myself, but the thing is
that most nations have, both Europe and the US have
what's called a fair use exemption. And so if I
copy a whole book, you know, that's a problem. If
(06:24):
I use part of it for a Google search result,
or I train part of it on a large language model,
and that's a new and novel and a different use, that's
called fair use. In Australia, our fair use exception is
very limited. And so what we find is overseas companies
large language models, but even Australian companies training their own
models on you know, maybe images or image recognition or generation,
(06:47):
those things are a problem for us, and so we
need to make that ... it seems like a straightforward
and there's no more reports needed, like the government just
needs to amend those. So that's one thing on the
data center. Two is there's so many more jobs available
in this opportunity, and we really call on the unions
to go from having four year apprenticeships to having something
(07:11):
where there is a stepping stone, because if someone was a call
center worker and they want to retrain to build data centers,
I don't think we can go through a four year
apprenticeship in order to make that happen. And so you know,
the unions can work with that. We should create tech trades,
we should create digital apprenticeships and they should get people
(07:32):
into the workforce in six or twelve months building data
centers or connecting batteries to the grid. The last one,
and I think this is a very bold idea here,
is to create the concept of a digital embassy. So
we have embassies in Australia where you know, they are
subject to the laws of the country, not Australia, but
they are subject to the laws of the overseas country. So Japan has
(07:53):
an embassy in Australia, it's you know, Japan laws. And
if we did that and said, hey, you can put
a data center on Australian soil, and you know it's
going to have Australian jobs, Australian steel, Australian fiber optic cable,
Australian power. But the computers in that data center are
subject to the laws of the country, you know, say Japan.
(08:14):
That would make us much more attractive to other countries
to host their data centers here in Australia.
Sean Aylmer (08:21):
Stay with me, Scott, we'll be back in a minute.
My guest this morning is Scott Farquhar, Co-Founder of Atlassian
and the Chair of the Tech Council of Australia. The
Digital Embassies. At the moment, am I right in saying
what you're saying is the difference is a data center
(08:42):
allowing Japan's laws to rule that data center at the moment.
That's not the case, Is that right? Because if I
have an information in the US, it's US law that follows.
Is that right?
Scott Farquhar (08:55):
So it's fascinating here actually, and probably not something obvious
to many of your listeners or many Australians, is that
the way international law has evolved around the digital age
is it's all about where the data center exists. And
so you might have an Australian accessing a data center
in Singapore that is operated by a US company and
(09:18):
in some cases that is governed by Australian law, in
some cases that's governed by Singaporean law, and in some
cases that's governed by the US law. And if you're
a company saying where can I put my data center,
it's nice to not have to think, well, what are
the laws of Australia, what may they change in the future,
you know, and how do I have to think about that?
And one of the reasons a lot of data centers are in
(09:40):
Singapore is because it's pro business environment and I think
we could leapfrog, you know that by literally making us
subject to the laws of the country that wants to
host their data in Australia.
Sean Aylmer (09:53):
At the Press Club yesterday you talked about sand in
the wheels. I think I'm not quite sure what the
phrase you used is, but it is basically government ensuring that
they were that they keep up with what the private
sector is doing, particularly around AI. Just explain that.
Scott Farquhar (10:11):
When these transformations happen, when we can use energy in
new and wonderful ways, we make something that was hard
now becomes easy. Certainly, the industrial revolution. It used to take
up you know, eighty days to cross the Atlantic in
both directions a round trip. It then took about eight days.
But what we found is the ports became the bottleneck then,
right because we didn't make ports more efficient. And it
(10:32):
actually took one hundred and fifty to two hundred years
to come up with the concept of containerships, you know,
to improve ports. And if you look at AI and
how it can make business more productive, the interactions with
government are going to become even more of a bottleneck.
And one example I give because I think it's relevant
to everyone in Australia is housing. At the moment, housing,
(10:54):
according to most of the Productivity Commission reports and others,
is bottleneck behind approvals. And at the moment, the way
you do approvals is you often do a multi hundred
page document, you print it out, you take it to
council and it sits on a desk for a few
weeks and eventually, you know, may be reviewed and then
you find out yes or no. And in that time
you don't know whether it's going to be approved or not.
(11:16):
You don't know what significant changes you might have. The
cost of your raw materials is going up every day
you sit there and wait for a reply. But if
you think about what's possible with AI, that same government
department could have trained a digital agent on every DA
that's ever been submitted, every DA that's approved, every DA
that was rejected, and that AI could work with the
(11:39):
council officer and means that every DA gets approved within
a week. And we can take that even further. What
about if that AI was available to the public, and
whilst it couldn't approve your DA for you, we could say, well,
you have a forty percent chance of approval or a
sixty percent chance of approval. Or, hey, here's feedback to
make your application better. If we did that, imagine if
(12:00):
you're sitting with your architect or your builder and you
want to know whether you can do something, you would
then submit it multiple times to continue to get it better.
And then you could take that even one step further.
At the moment, if you're a developer and you want
to build a block of apartments, you've got to buy
that land. You then have to you know, spend, in
that case it's months or even years to build that application,
(12:23):
and then so huge sunk costs, huge capital costs and
then if it often those things turn on whether you
can have six or eight apartments is the difference between
whether that makes sense or not. So imagine that developer
who could then interact with that you know agent with
that AI and know whether they could build those apartments
before they purchased that block. That would make it a
(12:45):
total make a huge difference to the nation in terms
of how fast we could build. And this is not
changing any planning laws. This is not saying we should
do anything outside of the planning laws. This is just
removing the friction that I called sand in the gears
of commerce that the government provides. And again, when we
can start maybe when it took a year to work
(13:06):
out your plans for a house to six weeks, were
not a problem. But as AI increasingly makes it easy
to design houses and faster to build houses with 3D
printing or other technologies we do, you know that that
government approval process is going to become even more stark
and that can be applied across the entire government. Imagine
we want the best in the brightest to come to Australia.
(13:26):
At the moment you know you can someone can be
sitting in Europe after work one day surfing seek dot com,
dot au you and finding if they want a job,
they find a job of their dreams. We think, you know,
Australia would have to have them, and then they work
out okay, well there's a multi month process to work
out whether I can get a visa approved here. Imagine
again if they could do that on an app in
(13:47):
an hour and find out whether they could get a
visa approved. And I'm not to say we have more
people come to Australia and imagine the bar we could,
you know, how high the bar could be if we
had many more people applying for these amazing jobs here
and so every level of government from you know, local
government all the way through to federal government can benefit
by using digital agents to speed approvals.
Sean Aylmer (14:08):
Are you optimistic about Australia's AI future, Scott?
Scott Farquhar (14:13):
I totally am optimistic, both at that level of nation
building where the data centers can really make a difference
for us. We just have so many natural advantages that
if we parlay them now we can grow them into
long term enduring advantages, but also the opportunity for businesses
to take up this new technology and if government, you know,
(14:35):
we have a government with a strong majority now, so
you know, they can't point to anyone else holding them back.
It's up to them to set the tone and tenor
of where we want to be as a nation. And
I think we have the opportunity to skate to where
the puck is going as a nation. And in my
experience the technologist is if you live in the future,
you start creating it. And if as a country we
(14:57):
can start living in that future, we can start creating it.
Sean Aylmer (15:01):
Fantastic advice. Tell me do you miss running Atlassian day
to day. You haven't been there for a year or
so a bit longer, probably do you miss it?
Scott Farquhar (15:08):
Oh, look I miss hanging out with the people, you know,
I miss out in the management team. I miss sparring
on ideas with Mike. But I have had opportunities now
to spend time with my kids, to travel a bit,
and to work on the tech industry and help out
with the Tech Council and that's been super rewarding.
Sean Aylmer (15:25):
Fantastic Scott, thank you for talking to Fear and Greed.
Scott Farquhar (15:27):
Great thanks Sean.
Sean Aylmer (15:28):
That was Scott Farquhar, Co-Founder of Atlassian and the Chair
of the Tech Council of Australia. This is the Fear
and Greed Business Interview. Join us every morning for the
full episode of Fear and Greed Business news you can use.
I'm Sean Aylmer. Enjoy your day.
Welcome to the Fear and Greed Business Interview. I'm Sean Aylmer.
We talk a lot about artificial intelligence, about how businesses
can use AI to improve productivity, and the challenges in
navigating a period of significant disruption, but in terms of
the opportunity for Australia, we're only just scratching the surface now.
One of this country's most respected tech leaders has used
a National Press Club address to lay out exactly how
(00:28):
big the potential is and what the government needs to
do to get us there. Scott Farquhar is the Co-Founder
of Atlassian and the chair of the Tech Council of Australia. Scott,
welcome to Fear and Greed.
Scott Farquhar (00:39):
I'm so glad to be here.
Sean Aylmer (00:41):
How big is the prize? The AI Prize?
Scott Farquhar (00:44):
Well, I want to take you back a little bit
in terms of history. When you look at humans as
builders of tools, all the advances have come when you
can really work out new ways to use energy to
advance human civilisation. So, we used wind and water to
mill grain. We used coal to power steam and eventually steel.
We used oil to power our cars and our planes.
(01:08):
And at each of those junctures when we used energy
for a more advanced usage, like it really propelled everything
we could do as a species. And we are now
at a moment in time when we can now use
energy to do knowledge work. And so whilst we've got
used to using energy to replace us plowing in a field,
(01:29):
we will eventually get used to you know knowledge, you know,
kind of using energy to replace a call center worker,
you know, answering the same call or the same request
day in, day out. And so in these moments of
time you have an opportunity to change the global pecking order.
And when also, you know, small advantages early on can
compound into big advantages over time. And so we'll say
(01:53):
two examples. One is the industrial revolution. So the UK
had accessible coal deposits, but of course they can use
to build you know, railways and steal and then the
railways made the next coal deposits even cheaper, which then
was a virtuous cycle, and of course that eventually led
to the building of their navy, you know, with steam
and steel, which led to an empire you know, for
(02:15):
one hundred and fifty years. And while that seems a
long time ago. If we take the example of Singapore,
Singapore went from you know, what would be argued a
sort of colonial you know, swampland you know, a century
or so ago to a country that's now sort of
a world power. And if you look at that, in
just in my lifetime, forty five years, Singapore has taken
(02:38):
advantage of containerships and you know, contanierships were a new technology,
and Singapore bet behind them, betting on ports and making
sure they had a stable rule of law and you know,
an advantageous business environment and as a result, they are
now the second largest port in the world. And again
that was from a small advantage that has compounded over
the last fifty years. And over that same time period
(03:00):
they've gone from forty per cent, give or take, of
the US's GDP per capita to one hundred and twenty
five percent of the US's GDP per capita. And so
in just you know, well, I think forty five years
is my lifetime, not a long time, they have kind of lapped the
US in productivity. And so I think about all that
and think the AI opportunity is a huge chance for
(03:20):
Australia to you know, rewrite the scoreboard in terms of
global trade. And that's the opportunity ahead of us.
Sean Aylmer (03:28):
So what's the Australian equivalent to ports or to coal?
Scott Farquhar (03:33):
So Singapore had some natural advantages, obviously a port, but
they were one of five ports in that particular region
of the world that could have become large. They had a
stable rule of law. They progressively attracted businesses. And if
we look at our advantages in Australia, let's just take
the data center opportunity for us, the ability to build
data centers to host computers, for the region and for
(03:55):
the world. A couple. First, we're you know, in a great region,
you know, which is the Asia Pacific region and Southeast
Asia region, which is actually reasonably large and growing when
it comes to computer usage. And so a statistic there
is that there are more users of ChatGPT between Indonesia
and Vietnam than there are in the US, so we're
(04:18):
close to that. We have abundant talent in terms of
our raw talent, we have access to green and renewable energy,
we have abundant raw materials, you know, if we want
to build concrete and steel to house these data centers.
We've got a stable rule of law, which is important
when people are looking to put these huge capital investments.
(04:40):
And lastly, you know, we, in this time of geopolitically uncertainty,
we have access to chips, you know, high speed chips
that many other countries don't have access to, and so
all of that are our raw natural advantages. And what
we need to do is press this early advantage by
really aggressively investing to sort of build those compound benefits
(05:02):
over time.
Sean Aylmer (05:04):
At the Press Club yesterday, you were talking about the
government needing to pave the way. Previously, maybe twenty years ago,
you were talking about the government getting out of the way.
What does the government need to do now to enable
private sector public markets to take advantage of what you're
talking about?
Scott Farquhar (05:22):
There are two areas I look out that the government
could really have a big impact. One is the data
center opportunity, and that is private capital largely, so we
don't need the government to provide capital here. What we
do need is for them to change copyright laws. In
twenty fourteen, the Law Reform Commission recommended changes to Australian
copyright laws. In twenty sixteen, the Productivity Commission, and the
(05:45):
reason for that is that our copyright laws are out
of step with the rest of the world, and so
that's holding and preventing a wad of large players from
putting their models here in Australia.
Sean Aylmer (05:55):
Just dig into that a little bit. So is this
because large language models can't access the information? I'm not
quite sure where you're going on the copyright laws.
Scott Farquhar (06:03):
Yes, let me go through that. In copyright law, it can be quite niche and esoteric.
And so that's a very valid question and I'm not
the best expert at this myself, but the thing is
that most nations have, both Europe and the US have
what's called a fair use exemption. And so if I
copy a whole book, you know, that's a problem. If
(06:24):
I use part of it for a Google search result,
or I train part of it on a large language model,
and that's a new and novel and a different use, that's
called fair use. In Australia, our fair use exception is
very limited. And so what we find is overseas companies
large language models, but even Australian companies training their own
models on you know, maybe images or image recognition or generation,
(06:47):
those things are a problem for us, and so we
need to make that ... it seems like a straightforward
and there's no more reports needed, like the government just
needs to amend those. So that's one thing on the
data center. Two is there's so many more jobs available
in this opportunity, and we really call on the unions
to go from having four year apprenticeships to having something
(07:11):
where there is a stepping stone, because if someone was a call
center worker and they want to retrain to build data centers,
I don't think we can go through a four year
apprenticeship in order to make that happen. And so you know,
the unions can work with that. We should create tech trades,
we should create digital apprenticeships and they should get people
(07:32):
into the workforce in six or twelve months building data
centers or connecting batteries to the grid. The last one,
and I think this is a very bold idea here,
is to create the concept of a digital embassy. So
we have embassies in Australia where you know, they are
subject to the laws of the country, not Australia, but
they are subject to the laws of the overseas country. So Japan has
(07:53):
an embassy in Australia, it's you know, Japan laws. And
if we did that and said, hey, you can put
a data center on Australian soil, and you know it's
going to have Australian jobs, Australian steel, Australian fiber optic cable,
Australian power. But the computers in that data center are
subject to the laws of the country, you know, say Japan.
(08:14):
That would make us much more attractive to other countries
to host their data centers here in Australia.
Sean Aylmer (08:21):
Stay with me, Scott, we'll be back in a minute.
My guest this morning is Scott Farquhar, Co-Founder of Atlassian
and the Chair of the Tech Council of Australia. The
Digital Embassies. At the moment, am I right in saying
what you're saying is the difference is a data center
(08:42):
allowing Japan's laws to rule that data center at the moment.
That's not the case, Is that right? Because if I
have an information in the US, it's US law that follows.
Is that right?
Scott Farquhar (08:55):
So it's fascinating here actually, and probably not something obvious
to many of your listeners or many Australians, is that
the way international law has evolved around the digital age
is it's all about where the data center exists. And
so you might have an Australian accessing a data center
in Singapore that is operated by a US company and
(09:18):
in some cases that is governed by Australian law, in
some cases that's governed by Singaporean law, and in some
cases that's governed by the US law. And if you're
a company saying where can I put my data center,
it's nice to not have to think, well, what are
the laws of Australia, what may they change in the future,
you know, and how do I have to think about that?
And one of the reasons a lot of data centers are in
(09:40):
Singapore is because it's pro business environment and I think
we could leapfrog, you know that by literally making us
subject to the laws of the country that wants to
host their data in Australia.
Sean Aylmer (09:53):
At the Press Club yesterday you talked about sand in
the wheels. I think I'm not quite sure what the
phrase you used is, but it is basically government ensuring that
they were that they keep up with what the private
sector is doing, particularly around AI. Just explain that.
Scott Farquhar (10:11):
When these transformations happen, when we can use energy in
new and wonderful ways, we make something that was hard
now becomes easy. Certainly, the industrial revolution. It used to take
up you know, eighty days to cross the Atlantic in
both directions a round trip. It then took about eight days.
But what we found is the ports became the bottleneck then,
right because we didn't make ports more efficient. And it
(10:32):
actually took one hundred and fifty to two hundred years
to come up with the concept of containerships, you know,
to improve ports. And if you look at AI and
how it can make business more productive, the interactions with
government are going to become even more of a bottleneck.
And one example I give because I think it's relevant
to everyone in Australia is housing. At the moment, housing,
(10:54):
according to most of the Productivity Commission reports and others,
is bottleneck behind approvals. And at the moment, the way
you do approvals is you often do a multi hundred
page document, you print it out, you take it to
council and it sits on a desk for a few
weeks and eventually, you know, may be reviewed and then
you find out yes or no. And in that time
you don't know whether it's going to be approved or not.
(11:16):
You don't know what significant changes you might have. The
cost of your raw materials is going up every day
you sit there and wait for a reply. But if
you think about what's possible with AI, that same government
department could have trained a digital agent on every DA
that's ever been submitted, every DA that's approved, every DA
that was rejected, and that AI could work with the
(11:39):
council officer and means that every DA gets approved within
a week. And we can take that even further. What
about if that AI was available to the public, and
whilst it couldn't approve your DA for you, we could say, well,
you have a forty percent chance of approval or a
sixty percent chance of approval. Or, hey, here's feedback to
make your application better. If we did that, imagine if
(12:00):
you're sitting with your architect or your builder and you
want to know whether you can do something, you would
then submit it multiple times to continue to get it better.
And then you could take that even one step further.
At the moment, if you're a developer and you want
to build a block of apartments, you've got to buy
that land. You then have to you know, spend, in
that case it's months or even years to build that application,
(12:23):
and then so huge sunk costs, huge capital costs and
then if it often those things turn on whether you
can have six or eight apartments is the difference between
whether that makes sense or not. So imagine that developer
who could then interact with that you know agent with
that AI and know whether they could build those apartments
before they purchased that block. That would make it a
(12:45):
total make a huge difference to the nation in terms
of how fast we could build. And this is not
changing any planning laws. This is not saying we should
do anything outside of the planning laws. This is just
removing the friction that I called sand in the gears
of commerce that the government provides. And again, when we
can start maybe when it took a year to work
(13:06):
out your plans for a house to six weeks, were
not a problem. But as AI increasingly makes it easy
to design houses and faster to build houses with 3D
printing or other technologies we do, you know that that
government approval process is going to become even more stark
and that can be applied across the entire government. Imagine
we want the best in the brightest to come to Australia.
(13:26):
At the moment you know you can someone can be
sitting in Europe after work one day surfing seek dot com,
dot au you and finding if they want a job,
they find a job of their dreams. We think, you know,
Australia would have to have them, and then they work
out okay, well there's a multi month process to work
out whether I can get a visa approved here. Imagine
again if they could do that on an app in
(13:47):
an hour and find out whether they could get a
visa approved. And I'm not to say we have more
people come to Australia and imagine the bar we could,
you know, how high the bar could be if we
had many more people applying for these amazing jobs here
and so every level of government from you know, local
government all the way through to federal government can benefit
by using digital agents to speed approvals.
Sean Aylmer (14:08):
Are you optimistic about Australia's AI future, Scott?
Scott Farquhar (14:13):
I totally am optimistic, both at that level of nation
building where the data centers can really make a difference
for us. We just have so many natural advantages that
if we parlay them now we can grow them into
long term enduring advantages, but also the opportunity for businesses
to take up this new technology and if government, you know,
(14:35):
we have a government with a strong majority now, so
you know, they can't point to anyone else holding them back.
It's up to them to set the tone and tenor
of where we want to be as a nation. And
I think we have the opportunity to skate to where
the puck is going as a nation. And in my
experience the technologist is if you live in the future,
you start creating it. And if as a country we
(14:57):
can start living in that future, we can start creating it.
Sean Aylmer (15:01):
Fantastic advice. Tell me do you miss running Atlassian day
to day. You haven't been there for a year or
so a bit longer, probably do you miss it?
Scott Farquhar (15:08):
Oh, look I miss hanging out with the people, you know,
I miss out in the management team. I miss sparring
on ideas with Mike. But I have had opportunities now
to spend time with my kids, to travel a bit,
and to work on the tech industry and help out
with the Tech Council and that's been super rewarding.
Sean Aylmer (15:25):
Fantastic Scott, thank you for talking to Fear and Greed.
Scott Farquhar (15:27):
Great thanks Sean.
Sean Aylmer (15:28):
That was Scott Farquhar, Co-Founder of Atlassian and the Chair
of the Tech Council of Australia. This is the Fear
and Greed Business Interview. Join us every morning for the
full episode of Fear and Greed Business news you can use.
I'm Sean Aylmer. Enjoy your day.
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