CEO / Co-Founder @EmploymentHero & Hero Foundation, 10x better employment globally, EY Entrepreneur 2025, Jobs + opportunity for all
Sydney, Australia
Joined March 2009
- Tweets2.7K
- Following1K
- Followers1.8K
- Likes13.6K
A 20-person business paying $1.5m in wages owes $31,731 a year in payroll tax in WA and $24,250 in VIC.
In SA, the ACT & the NT it owes $0.
Same staff, same wages but being on the other side of a state border costs tens of thousands of dollars.
New Zealand has no payroll tax and no general CGT.
In Australia we penalise hiring and starting a business, then wonder why unemployment is climbing.
Australia is strangling its golden goose, the small-medium sized businesses that are the backbone of our economy. Give them a break!
Everyone has access to intelligence now. So what’s left? @alexandr_wang says vision and mission. True. But I think AI should be judged on how much it maximises human potential. This is missing from the conversation right now.
Alexandr Wang on what matters in an age of abundant intelligence:
“The scarce resource isn’t going to be intelligence or agency. I really think it’s going to be vision and ambition.”
“Do you have a clear view of what you want the world to look like in the future? What is the one way in which you wanna put your finger on the scale for how the future of the world will develop?”
“AI will make that easier... But the flip side of that is then all of a sudden you can dream bigger.”
Ben Thompson retweeted
Labor’s new trust tax will raise $4.5bn over the forward estimates but cost small businesses & families up to $13.3bn just to restructure, three times more than it collects.
@AlboMP ‘s government is asking builders, pharmacies, cafes and family firms to spend billions before a single dollar of tax is raised. That’s economic vandalism, not reform.
#auspol #TrustTax #SmallBusiness wilsonassetmanagement.com.au…
Ben Thompson retweeted
As Australia’s new Digital Duty of Care Bill heads to Parliament, liber-net CEO @NAffects & I dug into the PR campaign behind it. What we found was one of the strangest pieces of political theatre in recent Australian history. 🧵
Ben Thompson retweeted
AI makes writing code easier than ever - but writing code isn't the same as building a product and building a product isn't the same as building a business. Those two things are still incredibly difficult.
This
Agents spawning other agents, agents operating in the background on every task, and agent swarms will consume 1,000X more tokens than people prompting agents 1 at a time.
The usage of AI as a chat system that can only work for you at the pace that you can prompt it will seem like a relic within a year or two. The vast, vast majority of tokens will be consumed by agents that are just doing continuous work for us in the background and in our workflows.
This is why we’re still so early in the curve of AI agent adoption right now, and how much more compute and infrastructure build out will be needed to sustain this.
Deloitte Access Economics: per hour worked, the Australian economy is smaller today than it was at the end of 2019.
We added people, not output. A larger economy is not always a more prosperous one.
The cash rate is already 4.60%. Deloitte expects another 25 bp in November. That is five rises in 2026, about $9,000 a year on the average new owner-occupier loan.
Households and SMBs have to carry that cost, not Government.
Australia needs more builders and fewer bureaucrats.
Australia: Consultation on the Government's non-compete ban closed last Friday.
The changes ban:
a) non-compete clauses in employment contracts for anyone paid less than the high-income threshold ($190,100) and
b) co-worker non-solicit clauses for every employee, at any pay. That includes the senior people who can walk out with a whole team.
I think a) is defensible but b) lands more cost and risk on the firms that hire, train and build teams.
Employers will need to rewrite their contracts and manage higher risks.
More bureaucracy for Aussie builders to manage.
It’s so freaking early
98% of US households aren't paying for AI yet
More charts in State of Markets II: a16z.news/p/state-of-markets…
The 750,000 new AI job titles is a US foundation model training number dressed up as a general employment story.
Annotators, data centres, AI engineers. People labelling the data and building the boxes the models run in. These are real jobs but not the real labour market.
It also misses every role that never got a new title. The finance manager, the recruiter, the ops lead now spending half the week on agents. Same employees doing different jobs.
Australia, the UK and Canada are not training the frontier models. Our hiring shows up a step later, when an ordinary company actually puts the AI tools to work. That is most of the employment market and it is still super early.
AI-related employment is surging:
AI-linked roles have accounted for more than +750,000 new jobs created in the US since 2023, according to LinkedIn estimates.
This surge has been led by data annotators, with +282,000 new positions created, followed by data center jobs at +117,000, and AI engineers at +105,000.
As a result, these 3 categories have accounted for +504,000 new jobs.
AI-related positions also offer significantly higher pay, with a median salary of ~$180,000 on LinkedIn, compared to $80,000 across all jobs.
This comes as the rapid expansion of AI infrastructure, particularly the buildout of data centers, is driving stronger demand for labor.
The AI boom is reshaping the US job market.
Ben Thompson retweeted
Exclusive: Inside @baseten
The $13B startup at the centre of the biggest fight in AI - Open vs Closed.
We spent a day at their SF HQ with co-founder & CEO Tuhin Srivastava, Charlie O'Neill, Mudith Jayasekara and the Base Labs team - to understand why they're building an open ecosystem.
Backed by top VCs led by @saranormous @altcap @apoorv03 @wmccarthy11 @saammotamedi @nikiscevak @lachygroom @willreed + more. Plus participation from @nvidia.
0:00 The Open vs Closed AI War
2:18 A Billion AI Requests a Day
3:43 The Best Models Are Chinese
4:06 Tuhin: Don't Rent Intelligence
5:09 Sachin & Tuhin Talk Cricket
6:02 Tuhin: The Real Bottleneck
10:15 Why Launch Base Labs?
11:35 "You Have to Have an Opinion"
12:52 Centralised Control Is the Danger
13:07 Publish Everything, Even Fails
15:08 Hugging Face & the 6-Month Gap
16:10 Why We Still Need Closed
Payday Super reduced working capital for the average SMB by $124k.
Many SMBs replaced working capital with credit cards.
Now the ATO refuses to accept credit but charges 11.5% interest on unpaid taxes.
This doesn’t end well…
As AI agents accelerate commerce the bureaucracy will become the biggest choke point. A single agent interface into government is brilliant and essential. What parties will take this to an election? @LiberalAus @AustralianLabor @OneNationAus
Today we’re launching America.gov, a single front door to the federal government.
Instead of opening a bunch of tabs across different agency sites and trying to figure out which information actually matters to you, you can ask America a question and get the relevant answer from across 29,000+ official government websites, with the source and what to do next.
@grok how much did this cost to create? If it’s not public estimate the cost of an equivalent service for Australia powered by Grok
This is OpenAI telling Australia to fix a security vulnerability.
This is not “AI hacking”.
This does not justify government-run “sock puppet” accounts on social media.
Gold plated hypocrisy!
Jim Chalmers scolding Morrison for interest rate increase. Keeping in mind, they were less than a fraction of what they are today. And today, Jim is the treasurer and Jim takes zero responsibility. Don't be like Jim. JIM is a fraud. A fake and a career politician. Look at the mess Jim has left you in. If you have a million dollar mortgage, you are paying $30,000 extra per year.
He will come out today and bare zero responsibility. You know Jim wants to be the next PM? He and Chris Bowen are fighting for the top job as Labor leader.
Ben Thompson retweeted
🇦🇺 Australia banned under-16s from social media.
Now the regulator enforcing that ban wants the legal right to catfish everyone.
The draft would let it run fake accounts, use AI-made posts, bypass platform rules, and keep the scale of it secret.
The stated goal is testing what users, including fake teens, are shown.
Fair enough.
But once the government can quietly run undisclosed accounts with legal protection, the obvious question is where “testing” ends.
Source: Public / Writer: Oliver
