Australia needs a ‘few rich men’ to turbocharge economy, says EV baron

Richlister David Dicker says too many Aussies expect governments to solve their problems and to grow a strong economy we need to rely on a ‘handful of guys becoming very wealthy’.

Richlister and electric vehicle baron David Dicker says too many Australians expect governments to solve their problems. Picture: Nancy Zhou/Bloomberg

Richlister and electric vehicle baron David Dicker says too many Australians expect governments to solve their problems and if the nation wants to become a strong economy it needs to rely on a “handful of guys becoming very wealthy”.

As the global economy is up-ended from Donald Trump’s trade war, sparking wild swings on markets and wiping trillions of dollars of tech stocks, Mr Dicker said Australia needs to embrace entrepreneurialism more.

But the founder and chairman of ASX-listed Dicker Data – which has a market value of $1.45bn – feared that Australia didn’t have the wherewithal to compete on the world stage.

“One of the problems that I have with Australia, and I was born here, is that the mindset of the Australian general person is, well, if there’s a problem, what’s the government going to do to fix it? I’m just not a massive fan of that whole approach to life. Basically, the government doesn’t have the answers,” Mr Dicker told Blenheim Partners’ No Limitations podcast.

“The government’s responsibility is to provide safety, security, infrastructure – the basic things where people can then leverage their own abilities to get ahead.

“But instead, we live in a country where at least half of the population believe that the government’s role is to basically design and control every aspect of your life, and I’m violently opposed to that, to be honest.”

Mr Dicker – who is worth $904m according to The List: Australia’s Richest 250 – spent most of the 1980s designing and building his own interpretation of what a general computer should be, but failed.

He later focused on distributing computers in Australia for big names such as Toshiba, Compaq and Hewlett Packard, before overseeing the listing of Dicker Data on the ASX in January 2011, which valued his business then at $25m.

Since then, Dicker Data’s shares have soared from 24c to $8.03 or more than 3200 per cent, keeping investors happy, delivering profits and dividends, year in and year out.

David Dicker has built one of Australia’s most successful tech business.

“The real issue that we have in Australia – and it’s probably improved a little bit, maybe – but the real issue is that if you want to build a strong economy, you’ve got to have a situation where a relative handful of guys can become very wealthy,” Mr Dicker said.

“That’s just not really acceptable to Australians. If you take a cross section of Australians and you said, ‘well, we can be the way we are, or we can have, well, more like what the Americans have got and these are the trade offs’. I think if you ran a referendum on it, the entrepreneur, billionaire guys, would lose out because most Australians don’t really want that situation.”

Mr Dicker has also founded Rodin Cars – a business he reckons he’s invested $40-50m into as it works on building its own line of electric sports cars.

David Dicker says he has invested $40-50m into as it works on building its own line of electric sports cars.

But overall, Australian spending on research and development has barely budged since the pandemic, despite the eruption of artificial intelligence, threatening to derail the federal government’s ‘smart economy plans’ as it slides down OECD rankings.

The federal government tapped Tesla chair Robyn Denholm to lead a review aimed at overhauling research and development incentives.

But Atlassian billionaire Mike Cannon-Brookes, while he said Australia needed an attitude adjustment to catapult it to becoming a smarter nation and economy, entrepreneurs didn’t need subsidies after the local industry came away empty-handed from Jim Chalmers’ federal budget.

“We have to fight on a world stage. We don’t need a subsidy. We don’t need any of this sort of stuff, right? Any business is going to need to meet the competitive market at some point, probably very quickly, and learn to compete and to win,” Mr Cannon-Brookes told The Australian.

“I think the best thing we can do in Australia is really understand our successes, champion our successes.”

TechnologyOne founder Adrian Di Marco said Trump’s trade war and crackdown on diversity, equity and inclusion was also a “wake-up call”.

“Trump is in the White House, and whether you love him or hate him, he started a whole new movement which is going to continue, and it won’t stop with Trump,” Mr Di Marco told The Australian last month.

“It’s a wake-up call. America is going to become very efficient, very effective. They’re going to put their country first, and unless it’s in their interest, they’re not going to play ball. So we have to get efficient and effective across the board – with our energy policies, with the way that public companies operate to make our industries competitive.”

Originally published as Australia needs a ‘few rich men’ to turbocharge economy, says EV baron