australia, capital gains tax and outliers

tech is not a cottage industry, but a deeply centralising force for change (which can be both good or bad, or both at the same time). the question of whether the tech industry can help deliver a meaningful step change in our national prosperity probably comes down to whether we can build true outliers here or not.

if we want to really make a dent in our declining productivity and standard of living, we need more than just sustainable companies that fund a comfortable lifestyle for its employees, we need crazy outliers which not only create ungodly numbers of productive new jobs (just consider how many people google employ), but also develop networks of capital, talent and ideas that lead to clustering effects, where entirely new industries can be developed and nurtured. i’d argue we’ve already seen this in saas in AU (ty canva, safety culture and atlassian!) but now we also need it in robotics, aerospace, transport, clean energy, ai, data centres, manufacturing, biotech, you name it.

so imo the question just becomes, how do you create an environment that does as much as it can to encourage people to attempt to build outliers?

interestingly, i’m not certain that it’s all about tax. after all, i can’t think of one global tech unicorn company from dubai (famously low-tax region), but i can think of a ton (spotify, klarna, lovable, legora...) from sweden (famously high-tax region).

i’d argue this is because great tech “scenes” are ultimately more about culture and less about politics. but. can/should politics help change/nudge the culture?

ultimately the cgt debate is about incentives, vibes and a very delicate risk/reward balancing act. the cgt discount change messes with the risk/reward equation for tech founders, there’s just no question about that. whether one considers it right or wrong, good or bad, isn’t actually the thing. the thing is just what the downstream and second-order effects could be.