Webinar: The digital disruption of directorships

And I want to frame things today from the context of the impact of not just digital governance, but digital trends around the world on governance.

So for...

For those of us here in Australia, obviously this matter spans across Australia and New Zealand and in fact around the world.

But for those of us in Australia, we kind of start here.

This is Joe Longo.

He's the ASIC chair.

So that's our corporate regulator here in Australia.

And he's been lighting the signal fires around digital governance expectations in boardrooms in Australia for a number of years now.

This is his quote from an AICD presentation he gave in 2025.

Australia is falling to the back of the pack in the global race for innovation.

And he connects that to the capabilities of digital governance in corporate boardrooms.

So he's concerned about the links between national prosperity and the lack of boardroom capability in this area.

And Joe Longo has a point.

The Harvard study on economic resilience, essentially how sophisticated an economy is, Australia ranks 105th of the 145 countries measured.

We are just behind Botswana in 104th.

So our economic growth has dropped 80% in our lifetimes and is currently the lowest it has been in 60 years.

Now, New Zealand are a little better than us at 68th, but both countries languish well below the mean.

So amongst OECD countries, we are the first worst, that's Australia, and third worst, that's New Zealand, on this measure of economic complexity, with Chile between us, right? That's a country where the average income is about $20,000 a year.

So if you place your eye on that black dot of New Zealand and you run it to the left, to the mean line, above which all other OECD countries live other than Canada, you can see there, That distance is what I call the lucky quotient.

That's where, based on the sophistication of our economies, we would sit if it wasn't for the fortunes of geography, history and natural resources.

So trace left from New Zealand, you can see where you'd hit that line.

Now do the same for Australia.

If we weren't blessed by those factors, the lack of technological development in our economy will put our GDP per capita in the bottom third of the world, well below that 100 mark, which is the GDP average.

And this is ranked on purchasing power per capital, that's PPP, which is about $38,000.

So we'd be about 20% below that.