Nothing quite focuses your mind like the threat of losing your house. Just ask Greg Boorer, the co-founder of pioneering CDC Data Centres, who was helping Australian customers get into cloud computing and artificial intelligence when the Firmus boys were getting their first jobs.
Building a business such as CDC, which Boorer started in 2007, takes the sort of singular, long-term vision that entrepreneurs invariably need to succeed – and handle the pressure of putting your house on the line to fund your business.
But as Boorer told The Australian Financial Review Chanticleer Lunch in Sydney on Wednesday, that sort of long-term vision is vital for Australia, too.
“Australia needs to be more ambitious. The leaders of Australia need to stoke that sort of ambition with the right settings, but also the right narrative,” he says.
Boorer argues that a 30-year vision of the sort of country we want to be is vital to escaping the low-growth trap outlined in the Intergenerational Report this week, which forecast that the economy would grow 2 per cent a year over the next 40 years, compared with 3.1 per cent a year over the past four decades.
It was a call taken up by another great entrepreneurial success story, Alex Vynokur, who started ETF provider Betashares in 2009 after arriving in Australia at the age of 15 from Ukraine with little English, and even fewer prospects. Betashares now has $90 billion under management.
Like Boorer, Vynokur argues that a 30-year vision is the starting point if Australia wants to shake off what he sees as a growing mood of complacency, and a shrinking sense of dynamism.
“We need something to really serve as an anchor for the entire Australian population,” says Vynokur.
“There’ll be times when Labor is going to be in government. There’s going to be times when Liberals are going to be in government. I mean, we might have somebody else in government. Who knows? Let’s not go there.
“If we have a clear belief about what Australia is all about, and more importantly, what we are striving for as Australians, that will always create an anchor, and that means that we will not be swinging basically from one extreme to the other.”
Source: https://www.afr.com/chanticleer/want-to-really-fix-australia-here-are-five-big-ideas-20260923-p60zxe