AVERY, Mr Alex, Managing Director and Founder, Notitia du PREEZ, Mr Pierre, Director, Notitia GREGG, Ms Elizabeth (Betsy), Director, Operations, Australian Computer Society TONKIN, Mr Casey, Policy Advisor, Australian Computer Society WHITELOCK, Ms Elizabeth, Chief Executive Officer, Australian Information Industry Association CHAIR: I welcome witnesses participating in the information technology and digital sector roundtable to give evidence. Thank you for your submissions. Although the committee does not require you to give evidence under oath, this hearing is a legal proceeding of the parliament. The giving of false or misleading evidence is a serious matter and may be regarded as a contempt of parliament. The evidence given today will be recorded by Hansard and attracts parliamentary privilege. I'll now invite you each to give an opening statement of no more than two minutes. What we want to do is have a discussion and ask some questions. We've got the submissions. I'll now hand over to you, and you can take it in any order that you wish. Perhaps Ms Whitelock could begin. Ms Whitelock : Thank you so much. The AIIA believes that we should consider the objectives of skilled migration within the broader context of the AI and digital economy in a way that supports, enables and upskills the domestic capability, whether that's through graduate programs and our VET programs or whether that's upskilling people who are mid-career. Skilled migration certainly has a place within the Australian context, but we must ensure that it complements domestic talent and its development. So it needs to be integrated into the national workforce and our education policy and frameworks to help us build sovereign capability today. Thank you. CHAIR: Thank you. Mr Avery. Mr Avery : Thank you, Chair and committee members, for inviting us to appear today. Notitia is an Australian owned data and digital transformation consultancy primarily based in Melbourne and Adelaide. We're not a large organisation. We've got a headcount of 12 staff at the moment. We've been operating for about seven years and have about 100-odd clients, primarily in the public sector. Before we founded Notitia in 2019, we'd both previously worked in big four consulting firms, boutique techs and private equity backed tech companies. From a workforce perspective, those organisations blended local Australian resources and, in some cases, a very proactive offshoring resourcing model. One of the joys of running your own business is getting to dictate how we deliver work, and our previous experience has led to us resolving not to offshore jobs at Notitia. In saying that, though, I note that half of our staff were born overseas, and we've sponsored four skilled professionals. We're here in our capacity as practical business owners who have gone through the trials and tribulations of hiring and attempting to hire Australians and then onshore applicants requiring a visa sponsorship. From our perspective, we've all arrived at tech from different backgrounds and through different experiences, and we've taken the position that having varied skill sets with varied backgrounds leads to the best outcomes for our clients. That includes career changing, as well as sponsoring and building up local capacity through graduate programs. From our perspective, skilled migration is one part of a broader strategy, and it needs to be practical and aligned to modern technologies and modern standards. When specialist skills can't be sourced locally, our experience has been that, far too often, the alternative is that job is created offshore, and that sends high-value work offshore, but the Australian taxpayer or the Australian company still is charged Australian dollars for the work that's delivered—but not in Australia. So, from our perspective, the migration settings should be responsive to rapidly changing technology roles while continuing to encourage businesses to build local capacity over the long term. We need both. Thank you. CHAIR: Thank you very much. Ms Gregg. Ms Gregg : Chair and members, thank you for the opportunity to appear before this committee. The Australian Computer Society is here today as both the professional body for Australia's tech workforce and the authorised skilled migration assessing authority for IT, data science and cybersecurity professionals. At ACS, we have a unique perspective on skilled migration, and we see it from the perspective of the business seeking talent, from that of the individuals building a life and a career in Australia, and from that of the practical operation of the migration system itself. Our central message today is that skilled migration has delivered substantial value to Australian technology and to our country but we are not yet capturing the system's full potential. Tech is a fundamental enabler of economic growth, productivity and national capability. Australia's technology sector contributes approximately $142 billion directly to our economy, while digital skills support an estimated $476 billion in economic activity across all industries. The effects of technology are expected to expand with artificial intelligence, as others have already mentioned. Despite the headlines, there's not yet evidence that this tech will replace all our jobs wholesale anytime soon. The IT profession is at the forefront of AI labour disruption and had in 2025 seen a decline in the total workforce for the first time on record, yet we are far from conceding full agency over our businesses, our governments and our lives to thinking machines. Like all powerful systems, AI needs to be maintained and governed by responsible professionals—professionals who can tell the difference between a good pull request and a bad one, professionals who understand the business risks and benefits of implementing a new piece of software and professionals who know how to identify and protect the most sensitive data of everyday Australians. That's why we expect Australia to need an additional 259,000 tech workers by 2035. Far from fantasies of full automation, we project technology employment to grow at around twice the rate of the broader workforce. Now, if the past is any indication, this continued growth in tech roles will continue to be met in part by skilled migration, and, since 2021, around 20 per cent of new workers into our sector came via skilled migration. In fact, of Australia's nearly one million strong tech workforce, around 45 per cent were born overseas. Why do migrants account for such a high proportion of the tech workforce? It's because a period of incredible growth in the demand for IT professionals was simply not met by domestic supply. When the workforce grew by 300,000 people between 2014 and 2024, absorbing the expanded demands of the IT labour market, only 80,000 domestic students completed IT degrees. ACS is always exploring ways to provide more training to Australians to help meet the growing demand for IT professionals, including through helping establish alternative pathways and skill led avenues into tech careers. We believe computing should empower all Australians, and it is a core interest of our society to advance our nation's world-class IT resources, especially the people that make it run. It's no understatement to say that much of Australia's digital infrastructure has been built with the help of skilled migrants who fill persistent gaps in the labour market. The system has in large part been working as intended, but there are many challenges. While most migrants settle successfully, many face barriers in translating their skills into appropriate employment. We hear from people who say their overseas experience is not recognised by employers, despite having completed a formal skill assessment. Visa uncertainty, employer hesitation and a strong preference for local experience continue to create friction in the labour market. From ACS's perspective, this is one of the most important opportunities to reform. The question for us is how Australia converts skill into productivity while maintaining a healthy, open labour market in which businesses of all sizes can access IT talent. ACS supports reform that maintains the strong integrity of the migration system while improving skills matching, supporting employer confidence, strengthening pathways into skilled work and helping migrants contribute at the level of their capability. We look forward to assisting the committee today. Thank you so much. CHAIR: Thank you. I might kick off with a couple of questions to get the discussion going. In terms of the rise of AI technology—even as far back as four or five years ago, there was a bit of talk about it, but I wasn't expecting it to be where we are today so quickly. I don't think many of us were. How does the rise in AI affect the skills that we now require? You spoke a bit about the catch-up that we're doing in terms of our own domestic training et cetera. What are the skills that we will need both in your sector and in the broader Australian community that perhaps we haven't even thought about at this point? Ms Gregg : We're actively engaged with the Future Skills Organisation, supporting harmonisation, and also actively promoting and supporting the use of the Skills Framework for the Information Age, or SFIA, which is an industry led capability framework. We're talking skills, right? I would reflect that a lot of what we hear in the media or in the headlines is skill loss, but it's actually skill augmentation. For example, a data analyst today is someone who may be doing a significant amount of data entry. It's very manual. There's a lot of user error or potential user error. In fact, what AI will provide—the entry skill might go away, but the quality assurance checks and the standard to maintain that data become more of a vigilance and requirement of the role. So it's shifting people out of the doing and into ensuring that they have the principles and the standards to meet the benchmarks and minimum requirements of that role. That's just one example, but that replays over and over again. I would also add, if you look at ANZSCO or OSCA—any of the classification tools we have around IT—they're incredibly tech led, which was true for a long time. But, now, we're seeing the emergence of more business practices, stakeholder management and means by which people need to ensure the use of critical thinking, communication and more of the front-of-house IT and not the background IT in the back room of the business. So things are adjusting, but they're certainly not removing roles or removing the requirement for the skill. CHAIR: Would anyone else like to add to that? Ms Whitelock : Yes. CHAIR: We'll kick off with Ms Whitelock. Ms Whitelock : I would agree with what has just been stated. I think the other reality is that the technology sector right here right now is at a sort of workforce inflection point where we have all of this capability coming to bear—AI automation, digital modernisation—and it is increasing the demand for capability but it's also changing, as has just been described, the shape of the roles that we have. We've just run a very large survey, and employers are asking for coders—sorry, they're not asking just for coders or generic digital skills; they're asking for people who can work with the AI tools themselves, to be able to understand the data. They asking for that human element of being able to apply judgement, manage the risk and actually translate that technical capability into some business outcomes. So it's really important that we keep humans in the loop. Ultimately, as has just been heard about from ACS, we are not seeing a shift in the number of people losing their jobs. Yes, there has been a shift, but it's not necessarily due to the AI pieces themselves, although that's perhaps what the media headlines would have you believe. But, as a consequence of that, it has a knock-on effect to the education that we provide. It's not just about giving people who go through university or VET courses just another set of capabilities around tools. It's also about giving them an opportunity to understand what a business requires so that, when they come into the pipeline looking for work, they can start to apply that in a real business sense. I know that, in Queensland, there are a group of universities working with private industry to identify, 'What do we need to do to ensure that our graduates are job ready?' Currently, we're hearing about graduates not getting jobs at that early stage in their career. How do we get them to that place where they can start to apply their tools in an everyday business context? So we still need that early talent because, at some point, our older employees will move on. We need that transfer of wisdom and experience. AI is here to stay. But this is not just about one single element; it's about the entire ecosystem within which we work. And that goes all the way back to the early days in schools, through tertiary education opportunities, internships and apprenticeships, bringing people into the business world capable and ready. That's the kind of framework that we are seeing starting to evolve. CHAIR: Thank you. Mr Avery. Mr Avery : To answer the question on the changing of skill sets due to the rise of AI, I guess what we're seeing is that the people that we're hiring and the people that are successful are people that have much more business focused skills. I try to say to people that it's very easy to teach you how to code but it's hard to teach you how to think. With the skill sets changing, we're crying out for people, genuinely, with empathy skills, design skills, conflict resolution skills, project management skills—actually being able to track with people. What we're seeing out of the market, especially at the graduate level, are highly-qualified-on-paper graduates that have never actually worked. They might have a master's in this and an undergraduate in this, but they can't have a discussion with a client. They can't front and have a longer form conversation. There's no real practical experience. So those that we hire at a graduate level are being hired more for non-technical skills, and, at many points, we're almost ignoring the university qualification and favouring those that have actually worked as front-of-house staff at McDonald's or pulled a beer at a bar. That kind of skill set has a whole bunch of practical ways that you interact with each other. I think what AI is showing us is that we can generate 100,000 lines of code in a prompt; it doesn't mean anything to us anymore. So the cost of developing code is going down to nothing, but the human interaction is becoming more and more valuable, and that's the skill set, as employers, that we're looking for. We're not looking for someone that can generate 10,000 lines of code. Mr du Preez : I'd just add—and you were sort of getting there—the data-literacy component. Graduates and people coming into the job market need to understand why data is so important and what they can actually do with it. The context of what they are doing is the vital thing now. Without the context, it's meaningless. And the quality of the data that is being used will make the AI better; the responses you get will be better. So it's that whole context, that focus on understanding why this is important and why it adds value. CHAIR: Deputy Chair. Mr REBELLO: You all represent a sector that is very fast moving and, as the chair pointed out, probably sometimes moves a lot faster than government—in fact, probably always moves a lot faster than government. My question is this. Our migration system, especially when it comes to skilled migration, centres around our skill shortage lists and occupation lists. Are those too slow for the fast-changing digital roles? Do they adequately reflect where the shortages lie in your sector? Mr Avery : Maybe I can give a simple answer. We used a third-party visa migration service for the four individuals that we sponsored, and part of the process for that was that they were classifying what we were looking for into whatever the appropriate skills role was. I would say that the terminology was exceptionally outdated. It referred to technology practices that don't exist anymore. I think one of the subcategories had something to do with 'data-entry clerk' or something like that. That is not a skill set that we would hire for. That is not a skill set that I believe exists in the market in the way that we would be looking for it. Definitions change, and they change rapidly, for sure. I can't speak to the actual process, because we paid a third party to deal with that. Ms Gregg : From an assessing authority point of view, there are two lenses here. One is how that occupation list or those skill shortages are identified. Based on the work we've done—and happy to contribute to that ongoing—there is a real risk aversion to looking more broadly than Australia and taking clues from the US and beyond about what skills are coming in or where we should be looking, rather than the demand we have today. To your point, if it moves too quickly, you've just set an occupations list that's established for two years or maybe longer, and we are already two years behind. On the other side of that, as an assessing authority, using those occupation lists and layering an industry lens upon them, we know that people are shopping and they're trying to figure out which occupation best serves them. In our domain, we take a skills led approach for a myriad of reasons, but it's because they don't fit into categories like what's been documented, and oftentimes they overlap. So it's not that they can't serve out that category; it's that we're losing the breadth of skill that they serve across multiple occupations. We also recognise that the points test itself is also seeking a legacy framework around the duration or the exposure, experience and education, when actually what we are trying to instil more broadly is currency. It actually doesn't matter if your university degree occurred 20 years ago. It's more important for us to ask: 'What have you done in the last five? How are you keeping up to date and demonstrating that you can go into the workforce now?' Ms Whitelock : Hear, hear! Absolutely. And may I just add currency and relevancy. In that framework, having been through the process, the question relates to the job skills themselves or the jobs listing. They are probably not going to keep pace with the way things are shifting and moving in terms of technology currently. Certainly my own experience is that the process of getting through a visa application to come out the other end with a stamp in your passport is long-winded. By the time you potentially come out through the other end, is that definition that you came in as still relevant in the market today? Given the pace of change, probably not or possibly not. But there needs to be something that's far more dynamic in terms of the reflection of AI, particularly, and the skills that are required. What are the specialist elements that currently are limited or don't exist here in Australia? How do we pick that up and actually frame that in that jobs list? It's a collaboration. Mr REBELLO: That's consistent with a theme that we've heard throughout today about visa processing times perhaps needing a bit of work. But, based on all of the responses just then, if there is a root-and-branch review of Australia's skilled migration system, what's the appetite for having a dedicated digital skills stream that provides some more dynamic eligibility settings? Is that something we should be looking at because your particular sector is changing in a way that perhaps other sectors aren't? Mr Avery : Yes. Ms Whitelock : Absolutely. Ms Gregg : Yes, I'd certainly be curious to learn more. I think the only thing I would caution is that dynamic is great, but you have to bring the rest of the employer and business of Australia with you. While processing times are long—and I understand there are a myriad of reasons—it's the ambiguity and the uncertainty that you put on the migrant to resolve or you put on the employer to. You essentially have two resumes in front of you. If one of them has a visa or a potential visa, you likely won't go with them, because you don't have any certainty of where they will be in two years time. Unfortunately, that creates a great shadow over the entire process. So you have people—while they have work rights, industry isn't responding to that in the same way that perhaps government is, assuring everybody that that is an appropriate and consistent pipeline. CHAIR: In terms of some of the witnesses that we've had in today and at other hearings that we've had, there's talk of an intracompany transfer visa. This is mainly with our bigger Australian companies or bigger companies like our banks that are overseas in London, some IT companies et cetera. How would that intracompany visa improve the productivity of IT and your sector, the digital sector? In other words, perhaps you've got an office based in London. You've got staff there. You've got staff in Geelong, for example, and you want to use some of those skills because you're producing something in Geelong that you're doing and vice versa. Would that help—instead of a digital only, an intracompany visa that allows you to operate with your partners around the world? Ms Whitelock. Ms Whitelock : Yes, please. I've had a personal experience of people being based overseas, coming into Australia and bringing their skills to the local office. Ultimately, the way to improve productivity is to ensure that whatever specialist skill is coming in intracompany is aligned with the local offices themselves and find direct training benefits. It's: 'Here are the skills. Here's the visa to come into the country. How do we run their capabilities into the national domestic capability?' For me, it's providing training to the wider organisation itself in that intracompany transfer, but, secondly, it's how we then take that and then move that out across a client base, a partner base and a reseller base, and into the wider community depending on the type of company that it is. As a concept, it makes sense, but it can't be in isolation, and it can't just be for the benefit of XYZ Pty Ltd. It has to be done on the basis that there is this transfer of skills at a local level. CHAIR: Would anyone else like to add to that? Ms Gregg : I'd add that we would be seeking an independent approach to this. While that would help big corporations, I'm also mindful that there's a real need for this independent skilled process and this merit based process for small business. That's where there's a lot of opportunity and further nurturing in that space. As an assessing authority as well, I'm mindful of the quality assurance and potential exploitation that can come from arrangements like this and would note that that would need to be considered in its design. Ms Whitelock : I totally agree with you, and I think that, as part of that process, there has to still be an assessment. If I take the example, which was not obviously intracompany but that transfer of skills from one location to another, there was a whole process against which those individuals were assessed for merit, educational backgrounds et cetera. There was still a process that went into place. I will also say that the organisation was actually not that large. It was, in effect, an SME at a local Australian level. One of the words that I said earlier, collaboration, is utterly key to the success of this. Given that the technology sector is made up of thousands of businesses, we represent sole traders through to multinationals, and they are all struggling to get skills, and 53 per cent of our membership base is small and medium enterprises. I know the problems that they're struggling with, and, if there were an opportunity to get specialist skills into the country that would benefit that sector, we should certainly look at it. They're invariably the ones who are struggling to find the people, and, if they can, afford to hire them. How do they do that, and what are the other incentives that they can apply to bring additional skills into their organisation? CHAIR: One other one that I've got is that we've heard from previous submissions about migrant workers and exploitation of migrant workers in all sectors across the board, whether it be very low skills or even the very, very high skills. I wanted to ask you if this is a problem in your sector at all. Have you seen evidence? Ms Gregg : I can attest. As an assessing authority and an institution that really supports the full journey, whether that's an international student coming into their first graduate visa or those applying independently or through sponsorship, the reality is there. In our work, we have quality risk and compliance, and we support significant fraud review and have serious concerns for conflicts of interest—be that by the employers that have been demonstrated, by the migration agent who applied on their behalf and so on. We work actively with the migration quality assurance department, as well as Australian Border Force and state migration authorities who are also trying to ingest and understand. There's certainly a seasonality to how this works. AI has also created some untenable situations in itself. I'd note that, while we talk about employer sponsored, there's genuinely a need to persist that independent layer, because that tech shell company work is still happening. We still find it. We have high risk and audit lists, and we would be happy to keep sharing that with the department but note that, as an assessing authority, our relationship is one to one, and there's an entire ecosystem of departments that support and leverage this system. We would love to see a more centralised and knowledge-sharing space, noting that fraud changes and that it impacts different sectors differently. When we talk about tech, I would also want to add that these employers aren't just a consulting firm in IT; they could be your local school, they could be a bakery, or they could be the local phone repair shop. We can't just put this in a bubble and say that it's only tech. It's something that's happening across the sector as we try and enable it. CHAIR: That's certainly the experience we've heard by speaking to a broad range of people. Mr Avery : Without giving specific examples, anecdotally, yes. In the sector you have conversations with people who, because of the nature of how they're sponsored through the employer, feel like they're effectively locked in. That stops them from moving about. That stops them from exploring new and different things. It creates unintended consequences and perverse incentives for different behaviour that you wouldn't normally expect in a free market. Once or twice, we've attempted to hire people only to realise that they're actually still locked in with their employer and so on. That's been a real shame. CHAIR: Deputy Chair. Mr REBELLO: The only other question I had follows one of the comments earlier from Ms Whitelock about the delays to visa-processing. Do you have a sense of what you think is causing those delays? Is it due to increases in other visa categories or other visa intakes? Have you got any idea of what the reasoning is from your engagements with departments? Ms Whitelock : It's only the feedback that we've been given when in the past we've inquired as to the progress of an application. The typical answer is, 'It's in the queue.' That's the phrase. 'Can you tell me where in the queue?' 'No. It's in the queue.' My sense is that there are simply too many applications for the department to manage. I don't get any sense that there's anything specifically other than potentially workload. Is that workload because the world of technology is more complicated to understand? I honestly don't know. That would just be a guess more than anything else, but workload was always my impression. Mr REBELLO: These people that we're trying to attract to Australia are obviously in high demand around the rest of the world as well. They would be for their skills. Do you, in your experience, see that the current state of our skilled-migration system means that we see people saying, 'It's too difficult to get into Australia. We're going to go elsewhere,' and Australia loses out on that talent because of these processing issues? Mr Avery : Unequivocally. As a small anecdote, we worked at an employer where exactly that happened. We lost a brilliant data science mind, who was being sufficiently mucked around with the process. There was no certainty. She had to make a call and ended up going to Ireland of all places, who accepted her with open arms very, very quickly. Now she's in the US, making three or four times what she would have made in Australia. She would never have left had the process not been—it wasn't even the speed; it was the uncertainty. It was the lack of transparency. The speed was okay. That is what it is. It's the complete lack of transparency. Ms Gregg : To add to that, I would say the processing time is notably slowing down in IT. We complete a longitudinal study of all of the assessed applicants who were successful through our process. We process about 20,000 migrant professionals a year. In the most recent two survey rounds over the last six and 12 months, over 50 per cent of them hadn't heard back. That's 10,000 successfully assessed professionals who are not even getting an invitation. Mr REBELLO: You think that this is actually a problem that has got worse over the last year or two? Ms Gregg : Yes, I think there was a notable shift, particularly in November when the tiering process came in. IT was below education, construction and engineering, which we respectfully understand. They're absolutely high priority, but it's stopped the innovation opportunity for independence. Mr REBELLO: I think I heard a few people say before that it's not just the time; it's the uncertainty. So, when you're engaging with the department, you get the answer that Ms Whitelock got, which is, 'It's in the queue.' You don't get, 'This is what stage it's at' or 'This is how much time we think it's going to take.' There's no ability to fast track it or to speak to someone else. Is that right? Ms Gregg : That's right. As an assessing authority, obviously we have a requirement for service. We are attempting to process about 50 per cent of our assessments within 27 days. We then say, 'Our assessment will expire in two years,' noting that skills may change and requirements may adjust. But now we're facing a point where more people are coming back to us and saying, 'Can you please renew my skill assessment, because I still haven't heard anything?' That makes us look bad, but it makes everybody look bad as well. We don't want to lower our standards, but we recognise that these are people are just stuck in the middle, and they've cleared every bar they could. Mr REBELLO: Outside a forum like this, is this something that you've been advocating for? Ms Gregg : Yes. While we haven't gotten the company of other tech professionals—it's nice to see you all—yes, certainly we're advocating working across assessing authorities as best practice, as I said, quality assurance, and working inside the department with their fraud mitigation, because obviously that is a point where PIC 4020 or other public interests need to be addressed. Then, more broadly, there are MPs and others trying to advocate, because this is not just one thing; it's multiple. I can appreciate that's the challenge you're left with today. CHAIR: Can I ask you to give us an example of a timeframe from start to finish? I know they all differ. Mr Avery : I may only be able to give you, admittedly, a small practical example of four. Ms Gregg : Fabulous. Mr Avery : We put the first person through the process about three or four years ago. She was processed in fewer than six months, from go to whoa. Someone with the equivalent skill set, the equivalent educational background and the equivalent practical experience in Australia, who's currently in the process, has been waiting more than 18 months, with no notice. CHAIR: Both cases are very similar. Mr Avery : They're very, very similar. CHAIR: One was done pretty quick. Mr Avery : One was done very quick, but that was only a few years ago. Now, with the most recent one—to be honest, the application was so like for like that I thought the visa company was copying and pasting. CHAIR: I was at a meeting the other day with the minister. There are astronomical numbers waiting to be processed at the moment as well. I don't know whether that falls in that category or not. I go back to the point that you made earlier on the workload. I know there were extra staff put on a couple of years ago. Ms Gregg : Yes, and we saw a resolution when that happened. There was definitely a blockage removed. CHAIR: That was to catch up with the 500,000 visas that were needing to be processed. Ms Gregg : Yes. CHAIR: Do you have anything further? Mr REBELLO: That's all from me. CHAIR: Would you like to add anything? If you had a magic wand and there was one thing you could change—I've asked this of every group that's come in—what would it be? What would be your No. 1 priority? Mr du Preez : I would just say transparency in the visa process. Having gone through the process myself 20 years ago, 'Don't call us; we'll call you' gets tiring. CHAIR: Knowing exactly where the process is. Mr du Preez : Definitely. Mr Avery : I'd use exactly the same word—transparency, 100 per cent. Mr du Preez : At the moment, it's just a black hole. Ms Gregg : In that transparency, I would love to see more awareness and education in the entire process. As I said, this isn't just governments cleaning; this is also engaging industry employers, like our peers here. While I've worked with outreach professionals at the department around explaining to employers what this visa is and how to process it, what they actually need is the value proposition and the opportunity that they're missing by not engaging or not giving this a try. CHAIR: You might want to add to this. In terms of your industry, there are obviously the jobs of the future and cutting-edge technologies. There are things being developed that create wealth in the economy or create a good economy for Australia and the opportunities to create things that we can export in terms of programs et cetera. How would our nation and the economy benefit by getting people who are highly skilled in the IT sector, in the computer sector, in the new AI industry? Australia obviously would have a big benefit out of it in terms of future economic prosperity, job creation, cutting-edge technology and being able to develop things. So just a quick— Ms Whitelock : May I? CHAIR: Yes, certainly. Ms Whitelock : As an association, we've been running an awards program for the last 33 years. We've just finished off all of the state awards ceremonies, and we go to nationals next week, but let me assure you that the talent that exists in this country today using AI and many other technologies is stunning and humbling all at the same time. It is incredible. I will also point out that in that in those rooms around the country we have people of all nationalities who have created solutions to problems that they've identified, and they cross a whole pile of different categories. We're already doing the problem solving using the technology with people who are born and bred Aussies and people who are migrants. I see it every day in the work that we do. But, in order for us to increase that throughput and to have additional products that we can bring to bear, it is about access to the skills and also access to that digital capability, which is more than just 'I know how to use ChatGPT'. It's way more than that. How do we take the specialist skills that may exist overseas, bring them to bear in Australia and support the domestic at landscape? That is a critical part of this. You were asking about 'what's the magic wand?' The magic wand is ensuring that, whatever we do from a skilled migration perspective—and I say this as a migrant myself—we are able to see those people coming in, uplifting what we already have, giving back through training and giving back through skills transfer. That way we can fast track that productivity. CHAIR: Those are very good points. Thank you very much. Would anyone like to add? Ms Gregg : I would if you don't mind. I just want to reiterate that it's not just about the top of the food chain. We need tech at every level, and so every skilled migrant working below their capability represents a productivity opportunity here. Overseas born tech workers contributed $56 billion in wages to the Australian economy in 2025, and we have a real opportunity to leverage that and to continue its success. It will require the non-glamorous as well as the glamorous. Innovation is paramount to this sector, absolutely, but I would be remiss if we didn't acknowledge that it's tech at the middle, at the bottom and at the top of every organisation that ultimately makes it a business outcome and that can be realised into something that's more than just the tool. Mr Avery : Maybe just from a business perspective—and I'm conscious of not trying to exceed the terms of reference of the committee—I think it's holistic and it's a combination of things, right? We want clear visa pathways. We want clarity around process and the risks that we take on as employers by sponsoring these people. That's what we're looking for, in terms of generating some economic value out of emerging technology, AI and all the rest locally. It's multifactored. We're looking at things like proper R&D incentives and support for things like export grants to take Australian products out to a global market. We're looking for tax incentives. We're looking to not be penalised on the gain as a business owner for developing technology. If we compare the tax structures to, say, New Zealand or Singapore when developing technology in Australia and if you were looking to exit or to sell, you're paying substantially more tax. And so, again, I'm conscious of the terms of reference of the inquiry, but it's not one single fix. It's a holistic approach to treating Australian technology as a real export industry and then wrapping the framework around that. That covers more than just migration. CHAIR: Thank you very much for coming today. Thank you for your submission and for the discussion that we've had. If there's any information that you wish to send through that for whatever reason wasn't raised today but you may think about later, please do so. If there's anything else that we wish to ask you, we may contact you again. You'll also be sent a transcript of all the evidence that Hansard has kept today, and you'll also have an opportunity to request corrections to any transcription errors. That concludes our hearing program for today. Once again, thank you. I thank the committee who was here, the deputy chair and the others who joined us online, the secretariat for organising everything and, of course, Hansard for keeping an accurate record of what was said today. Committee adjourned at 16:00