[Smerity]

To expand on one of the points in the article, let's expand venture capital raised per capita[1]... Israel: $170 per capita, USA: $75 per capita, Australia: $4.09 per capita.

Austrlaia literally spend more on a single day of gambling (Melbourne Cup: $7.27 per capita) than we do in our entire venture capital industry.

The government have also decided we're betraying the country by "abusing" a visa program to get more skilled programmers here. Of our 12,000 IT graduates, 8,000 of them are from overseas. 4,000 graduates doesn't go very far... Many of the 457 visas would also likely be programmers from international companies staying in Sydney: Atlassian and Google have numerous offices abroad and commonly allow programmers to travel around. The Australian government have no clue what's going on.

Mike Cannon-Brookes, founder of Atlassian, just tweeted "How can you say IT is the future of the country, then complain when we import skilled labour to help us?!"[2]

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venture_capital

[2]: https://twitter.com/mcannonbrookes/status/312033343988449280

[wluu]

I heard Mike on radio yesterday, here's his interview with Radio National Drive - http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/drive/it-indust...

[mattbarrie]

It would be 4,000 local IT graduates per year spread across our 1,500 startups, multinationals like Google and the corporate sector like banking & finance. It's not enough by any stretch.

Also that's not saying that all those 4,000 are good graduates. A top tier institution like the University of Sydney might graduate 100 per year. If you look at Sydney city, there might be the same from UNSW, UTS, UWS, Macquarie etc. That leaves it pretty thin on the ground.