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Rock and R&D: a model for Aust export success

May 06, 2015
The Hives - part of a golden era in Scandinavian metal and punk.

The Hives - part of a golden era in Scandinavian metal and punk.

Treasurer Joe Hockey’s Intergenerational Study outlines some of the menacing realities facing Australia in light of its aging population increasingly leaving the workforce.

By seeking the answers down the road of austerity and deregulation Australia’s policy Mandarins have seemingly ignored the part that young innovators will play in this seismic shift in the economic landscape.

However, the Scandinavians may have found a solution to Australia’s impending economic convulsion through a policy that is a boon for tech start-ups and rock bands alike.

The dimly-lit path

When you first stare into the tiny black vortex that is the unfriendly end of a Beretta m12 submachine gun you cannot help but notice how graceless it is; more like the deformed offspring of a tractor and a pig than a sleek piece of technology.

In my experience the gun’s unstylish nature is only further highlighted when an impeccably dressed member of the Carabinieri points it at the windshield of the band tour van while I desperately try to remember the Italian for: “PLEASE DON’T SHOOT! I am simply a young Australian, small export-business owner attempting to innovate a new product in an ever-changing, international job market!”

While not every young Australian will have to prevaricate at gun-point in order to create business opportunities, many will find themselves walking a career path that is far more dimly lit than the one trodden by their baby-boomer parents.

This is foreshadowed by two recent and unsettling occurrences:

  • The restructuring of the Chinese economy towards renewable energies and away from the resources currently supplied by Australia (iron ore, thermal coal and liquefied natural gas).
  • In addition to massive proposed cuts to tertiary education the Abbot Government has cut spending on science, research and innovation to the lowest level since records began.

So does this mean that the average motivated young person is doomed to claw their way through the throng at university, walk out with a degree that is only good for soaking up spills in aisle five and then find themselves in a technology-based future where they are outstripped by their counterparts in Slovenia?

In short – maybe. However, there is another path.

Investing in R&D

The joyous nightmare of touring the world in rock bands reveals many previously veiled curiosities: that fans providing unsolicited viewings of their genitals can be both an intriguing and ominous experience; that five-day-old potato salad can, in a pinch, be consumed using a pair of broken sunglasses; and that wherever in the world you gig you will encounter a band with Scandinavian accents earning more money than you do.

Putting nudity and food-poisoning to one side for the moment, it is worth considering how relatively small nations such as Finland and Sweden manage to consistently produce innovative, service-based, export businesses (to borrow the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade term for a rock band).

These countries were stuck in an economic malaise during the 1980s and 90s brought about by a reliance on resources industries that had begun to stagnate (sound familiar?). Forced to respond to that financial crisis, both countries implemented significant public investment in R&D and education in an aim to create the shift from a raw-materials economy to a knowledge-based economy. This investment in knowledge and innovation was key in the creation of the tech giants Nokia and Ericsson.

The solution that the plucky Fins found was to implement a “cluster policy”. In essence this policy mandated public investment in projects that included small and medium-sized firms alongside larger firms. This method ensured that tech developments made by the larger company working on the project would “spill over” to the smaller firms.

By way of example: imagine a scenario where the Rolling Stones take a young, unheard of band on tour. Through their shared economic enterprise, the young band will learn many critical lessons from the Stones’ such as how to run an effective sound-check, how to warm-up properly before a show, how to ensure that your guitar player can find his pants etc, all in a venue far larger than the young band could ever hope to play by themselves.

In fact, both Sweden and Finland did apply similar policies to the cultural sphere with investment in innovation and a promotion of business clustering. This ushered in a golden era of Scandinavian metal and punk with bands such as Millencolin, The Hives, Opeth and Apocolyptica among many others achieving world-wide success as a direct result of these policies.

Green shoots

So how does the Australian response measure up to these tech-savvy, rock-star Nordic peoples?

The Abbott government’s Intergenerational Report has foreseen many ominous shadows shuffling around the 2055 signpost. But while it offers numerous strategies to unwrap the “green tape” “burden” that is supposedly strangling mining investment, it makes only the most fleeting references to fostering education, while the promotion of R&D is almost completely absent from the solutions proposed.

The report resembles nothing so much as a wheezing, one-hit-wonder band from the ’80s forlornly limping through the single song the crowd came to see.

However, here in South Australia the first tentative steps toward change have been made, at least in the rock world, with an industry cluster being established at the St Paul’s Creative Centre. Adopting this kind of business clustering policy on a federal level would be a large step down the road towards creating a innovative, prosperous, knowledge-based economy. Just such a policy could breed the kind of band that no Italian law enforcement official would want to threaten with an automatic weapon.

While the Federal Government dithers over the wheezing, pension-hungry, grey avalanche hobbling into view, it is failing to see that the economic solution lies in supporting innovators.

It is time to stop paying mumbling lip service to Australia as “The Clever Country”. It is time focus on innovation rather than deregulation. Its time to unleash a Viking war-cry as we tear-it-up in the mosh-pit to the thumping beat of studiously applied R&D investment reform.

Jett Myrmidon is an Adelaide record producer and musician.

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