[jacques_chester]

A lot of the VC funds that have launched in the past few years are actually seeded by government funds. Not a model that lends itself to genuine risk taking.

Just imagine the headlines:

    TEN MILLION WASTED ON PHONE APPS

I live in Perth. Fellow ex-UWA folks of my acquaintance have the same complaint as me, which is as follows:

Perth has buckets and buckets of capital. This town is stupidly flush with cash. And Perth's taste for risk is much higher than the rest of country. You can raise tens of millions of dollars for high-risk, high-reward ventures in a relatively short time.

But there's a catch: this only applies if your proposal is to take some geologists and a drilling crew for mineral exploration.

The lifecycle for startups is ostensibly quite similar, but ... no dosh. The local investors don't really want to know about it.

edit:

That said, I wonder if Australia's intelligentsia will ever get over fetishising whatever industry and country which happens to be in the news a lot. I remember endless song and dance about Japanese cars. Now it's Silicon Valley.

Eventually it will be, I dunno, rockets and jetpacks. From Montenegro.

Meanwhile Australia is one of only 3 countries left with AAA rating and is the only country in the world that has had a growing economy for umpteen years. You can go a long way with sensible, basic policy settings.

[jbarham]

> You can go a long way with sensible, basic policy settings.

A pity then that Australia's federal and state government policies (negative gearing, first home buyers grants, interest only mortgages for investors etc. etc.) have done so much to pump up the real estate market into such a huge speculative bubble than will do untold damage when it finally pops.

It's insane what Australians are expected to pay for basic housing in one of the world's most lightly populated countries/continents. Here's an example picked at random: http://www.realestate.com.au/property-house-vic-north+melbou.... 3 bedroom terrace house (i.e., no windows in side walls) in North Melbourne, 1 bathroom, no parking, all yours for a mere $775k at 6.5% mortgage rates.

[jacques_chester]

I agree that this is one policy subject where Australia flatly gets it wrong.

I was thinking of other things though: floating dollar, low tariffs, relatively light regulation of many subjects compared to world averages, somewhat predictable inflation targeting policy of the RBA and so on and so forth. We get a lot of things more or less right.

[sien]

Many other countries have laws that allow negative gearing. The US has substantially cheaper housing (even at the height of the bubble in much of the country) and there you can deduct the interest on your own house against your income and get a 30 year fixed loan, something you haven't been able to do in Australia since the 1980s.

Australia has pretty tight land release laws.

If we had more cities with decent jobs you might see housing prices go down or at least go flat.

It's also worth noting that Australian housing was fairly cheap until the early 2000s (excluding Sydney)

[jbarham]

US mortgage rates are anomalous since the market has essentially been nationalized as the vast majority of mortgages are underwritten by Freddie Mac or Fannie Mae. It's insane that right now the average 30-year fixed rate mortgage rate in the US is 3.63%. (Source: http://www.freddiemac.com/pmms/index.html?intcmp=CWS-HP) That's almost half what Australians pay for a 5-year mortgage!

Australia does have tight land release laws, but it means that property prices are kept artificially high and too much capital is tied up unproductively in mortgages instead of investing in innovative, high-growth industries.

[jacques_chester]

I'm not so sure. There's still institutional bias against venture investment in Australia.

Superannuation savings are north of AU$1.5 trillion dollars at this point. Supposing that "only" a trillion of that is held by fund managers, then a mere 0.5% shift in portfolio allocations would pump $5 billion dollars into VC.

Given that the total Australian VC is a few hundred million on an outside guesstimate, that'd be pretty noticeable.

Edit: maybe I should be knocking on doors at super funds? Though I guess the local VCs are doing that already.

[jfoster]

Why should they? It's not what they know. People who have big wins in tech startups generally don't invest in mining ventures for the same reason.

[jacques_chester]

Because I have the primeval Australian political instinct:

Somebody has lots of money, they bloody well ought give me some!

:D

[joonix]

You forgot to mention housing (property) investment. Australians worship real estate investment above all things. Most think property will still double every few years even though they are already at insanely high levels.