Atlassian push to revive Sydney’s Australian Technology Park

Australia’s start-up poster child wants to transform Sydney’s Australian Technology Park into an innovation hub.

Atlassian CEO Mike Cannon Brookes says universities, big tech firms and even Uber support its plan. Picture Britta Campion

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Australia’s start-up poster child Atlassian is pushing hard to transform Sydney’s Australian Technology Park into a long-term innovation hub, and a new report from PwC has backed the bid, showing the city could reap substantial benefits.

The NSW government is currently deciding the fate of the ATP, a building Atlassian CEO Mike Cannon-Brookes sayshas “never really taken off” since it was opened in the mid-1990s.

Atlassian is pitching itself as the key tenant in a new iteration of the ATP, and it says it has secured support from two “large, iconic Australian technology companies” along with universities, Sydney co-working space Fishburners as well as venture capital firm Blackbird Ventures and a number of international firms like Uber, who have confirmed they would join Atlassian as founding tenants.

“We’ve got a huge list of names — we’re being inundated,” he said.

Mr Cannon-Brookes said the PwC report, commissioned by Atlassian and released today, is designed to give the government “some ammunition to make a sensible decision”, and supplies a “clear … argument for why our state needs this”.

The Unlocking Sydney’s Innovation Potential report includes PwC modelling showing the long-term value delivered by a technology-focused ATP could be $390 million more than other uses of the site would deliver over 10 years.

“Long-term economic gains, such as the wider economic increase in productivity, take longer to eventuate,” the report says.

“However, these long-term economic returns can deliver considerably greater upside than short-term financial gains (such as sale price of the site), which do not necessarily flow through to the wider economy.”

Mr Cannon-Brookes, who runs Atlassian, a $3.5 billion global software company, with co-CEO Scott Farquah, said the Australian Technology Park had essentially been a technology park in name only, and was potentially destined to become just another run-of-the-mill industrial park.

“We have a large city here in Sydney, and we have a good but disparate industry and ecosystem,” he said. “And if we want that technology ecosystem to grow at a much faster pace, as I think people generally do, one of the things we need to do is give it a physical location and make it a central focus. That’s really important.

“We’ve backed many Australia-based start-ups and we want to keep them around. We also want our kids to be able to have jobs in this city. We think this park is an important piece of the puzzle.” Mr Cannon-Brookes said there was a ‘chicken and egg’ issue: many of the local technology players only wanted to move into the space if everybody else moved.

“There’s a real momentum here towards it, and that’s what we’re trying to show to the government. We’re trying to tell them we’ll sign a ridiculously large lease to move ourselves, and we want to do that as long as other people are willing to come with us,” he said.

He said Australia was “so far behind” innovative cities like Berlin and London.

He said that even though the city of Sydney and NSW state government were “trying interesting things”, the federal government “aren’t interested at all” in start-ups and innovation.

PWC’s Jeremy Thorpe told The Australian the NSW state government had talked a lot about creating the jobs of the future, particularly with its $190 million Jobs for NSW fund announced last week, and the ATP would be the perfect place to foster such innovation.

“We want Sydney to have a globally competitive technology industry and the fact is that people want to work in places that are attractive to them,” he said. “We don’t want to lose this opportunity because there are not many opportunities like this that come around in Sydney.”