Mantra

11/22/2015

Here’s the Bill Ferris, AO, story.

Bill is an old mate of my former aging venture capital business partners, Roger & Roger. He formed the first venture capital fund in Australia back in 1970 before quickly switching to private equity.

Yep 1970, six years after I was born.

So he is as old as Gough Whitlam or thereabouts. But still alive, just.

Bill looks preserved in the bottling sense. Like those old dudes running around St Tropez with the acquired wisdom that a tan hides all wrinkles.

False economy, I call that.

Anyway, being a 45 year veteran of Sydney’s business functions and charity events, Bill is well connected to the other veterans of the business functions and charity events in this fair city of ours.

One of these is the current prime minister, the master of eloquence, the saviour of the chattering classes, Malcolm the Second.

Malcolm has just appointed Bill as the Chair of Innovation Australia, yet another of the scourge of oxymoronic federal government advisory boards with dyslexic monikers.

Last week The Conversation asked me to pen an article on the subject of Bill and his chair. I momentarily forgot my mantra (‘It doesn’t matter, leave it alone’) and emailed Bill’s pitbull of a personal assistant to line up a coffee chat.

Before I had a reply I managed to read some of Bill’s ‘big’ ideas. More STEM education, ‘no liability’ corporations for the tech sector, more tax breaks, a ‘patent box’, and more university research funding. All of these are recycled headlines that either make no sense at all, or no sense without a previously unvoiced context.

And most puzzling, “Mr Ferris also said governments should make it easier for companies to access capital for high-risk, high-reward investments. Companies should also be given much greater access to government data to experiment with, he said, with appropriate privacy and security safeguards.”

To the first one I say, how exactly? Another white collar welfare handout? And “no!” to the second one.

Just when I was having major second thoughts about writing this article, Toni, the pitbull, gets back to me saying that The Conversation had doubled up; they had asked both Michelle Grattan and myself to do a piece on the wrinkly subject. Toni seemed outraged at such duplicity and inefficiency.

I took this as divine intervention and I have extracted myself from a process that could only be described as a hiding to nothing.

It’s clear to me that Bill has no genuine subject matter expertise which is not surprising given his age and the fact that he has been in Private Equity his whole life.

Private Equity is not a bastion of innovation. It’s all about using capital to clean up established companies that are poorly managed and/or poorly owned, for profit.

So it seems that Bill’s insights into converting Australia into an innovative exporting nation have been gleaned from the media where 30 years of self serving whining from the recipients of government handouts has framed the discussion.

Chestnut central, doomed to fail, constructed on a scaffolding built with a complete lack of rational critique.

And it all survives because it is a very complex economic issue understood by very few. Just for the record, any plan that doesn’t have at its core a blueprint to drag our large oligarchical corporations in the services sector into the development and export of high tech solutions is a furphy.

Back to my Mantra.

I have discovered, no matter how eloquently or diligently I express myself, that a comprehensive and thorough review of the subject (of how to fix Australia’s lack of high tech exporters) falls on deaf ears.

Why? For some the subject is simply too complex. For others the discussion too long. A large grouping finds that the truths sit uncomfortably with their arguments for further government handouts. Many of those interested in the subject are experts in some other aspect of business but just don’t know what they don’t know – the scourge of the Australian business sector, this. Many others don’t give a shit.

I decided some time back to get myself into this latter category as a means of maintaining a higher degree of personal contentment.

It’s a tough transition to pull off. I am genuine child of the enlightenment living in the post-enlightenment era. I just have to suck it up and move on.

I will get there! I always achieve my goals eventually.