Atlassian chief Mike Cannon-Brookes urges ASX to tighten listing rules

Atlassian’s boss says the ASX must tighten its listing standards amid doubts over the fundamentals of local listed tech stocks.

Atlassian boss Mike Cannon-Brooke says the ASX must tighten its listing standards, as questions continue to swirl around the fundamentals of local listed tech stocks.

With tech wreck Guvera receiving a rare block from the ASX in 2016, several companies this year have tested listing standards with questions surrounding the likes of GetSwift, Big Un Limited and Buddy Platform. The share prices of those companies crashed after investors learned of disclosure breaches and questionable revenue projections. “Clearly there are some companies listing that are not all they’re cracked up to be,” Mr Cannon-Brookes told The Australian. “The ASX obviously needs to continue to tighten its listing standards. It’s trying to compete, and listings is where they make their money as a company.”

Yesterday, Mr Cannon-Brookes addressed a Senate committee on the future of work in Melbourne, putting forward a case that the country’s visa system was broken and declared that planning was needed to maintain Australia’s economic prosperity. He said uncertainty surrounding 457 visas had directly hurt his company’s ability to hire, and Australia’s success in the future would rely on its ability to attract the world’s best tech talent.

On the sidelines of the committee meeting, Mr Cannon-Brookes told The Australian he emailed the committee a week and a half ago, frustrated at the absence of a representative from a technology company.

“When I looked I was the only person presenting from an actual workplace or company, rather than some organisation, which represents this group or that group. How do you talk about the future of work without people from workplaces? It’s a bit odd,” he said.

The executive, who joined Bloomberg’s Rich List last week as the world’s 499th richest person, said the main point he wanted to get across to the committee was that the tech industry is important and needs to be nurtured and grown.

“What’s sad about this is the Australian investor community undervalues tech, there’s no doubt about that. The market undervalues great Aussie tech companies.

“The tipping point for some of these technologies will be very, very fast. And if you look at the closing of a couple of car plants in South Australia and how damaging that was, that’s going to be nothing when compared to this.

“If you look at NAB, they said they’re letting go of 6000 tellers and getting 2000 software engineers, we look around and go where the heck are they going to get 2000 engineers from?

“The technology industry’s problems are everyone’s problems in the future, and then the whole disruption thing, we just don’t plan. We’re not very good at planning ahead for that stuff. I worry it’s going to be really painful if we don’t plan.”

Pointing to research showing 40 per cent of jobs might be displaced in the next 10 years, Mr Cannon-Brookes told the panel he “hated to have to scare people”, but said it seemed to be the only way to get action.

“Hopefully we can solve this apolitically, it’s not a left or right debate,” he said. “It’s a big problem we’ll have to solve. All tech disruption comes with social unrest; the jobs that were lost were not the jobs that we regained, and that created a lot of dissatisfied parts of society. We want to avoid that, I think.

“It’s really hard; we who live in the tech industry are used to disruption, and competing with disruption is a constant. Economies and societies aren’t really used to that, it’s not a natural state of being and we need to jolt out of that. We’re 20th on the OECD, we don’t want to be drifting down. We want to drift up.”