Every year, more than 200,000 Australians slip through the departure gates. Among them are some of our brightest minds, lured by the glittering promise of opportunity overseas. The three most brilliant people I know? One landed at Oxford before launching a med-tech start-up with Silicon Valley backing. Another joined an AI speech-recognition firm in New York and casually talks about Mars as his next career move. I married the third one, and even that may not be enough to convince her to stick around.

Where will our next generation of innovators come from? Credit: Simon Letch

This month’s Productivity Commission roundtable is Jim Chalmers’ chance to take his reform agenda for a spin. While the roundtable will toy with a transitional GST rebate and the ACTU’s four-day fantasy, it will ignore the most urgent leak in our productivity pipeline: the innovators.

If you’re in the start-up game, it’s no shock that your sights are set on the US. The gravitational pull of Silicon Valley or New York, where ambition rubs shoulders with billion-dollar ideas, is hard to resist. But we know money talks. The US venture capital market is a $2 trillion juggernaut – nearly 300 times the size of Australia’s $6 billion pool. When the funding gap is that wide, it’s no wonder our brightest minds are boarding flights instead of building empires at home.

We shouldn’t forget the young professionals in industries like investment banking, management consulting and law who will soon relieve themselves of client calls and corporate hierarchies. Lockstep progression and conservative cultures have dissuaded them from........

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