Atlassian’s lessons in passive aggression, best served Canberra cold

Atlassian CEO Mike Cannon-Brookes arrives at the National Press Club in Canberra. Picture: Martin Ollman

Fresh from firing 150 employees at Atlassian on Wednesday morning, its billionaire CEO, Mike Cannon-Brookes, flew into Canberra to watch his co-founder and technical frenemy, Scott Farquhar, deliver a speech at the National Press Club on the limitless potential of artificial intelligence.

The irony wasn’t lost on anyone. NPC president Tom Connell handed Farquhar the podium at 11.30am, just a few hours after Atlassian employees learned, at 8am, between sips of spirulina, their colleagues had been sacked because the in-house AI had become too good for the business.

Customers, essentially, had stopped complaining about the products, needed less help, and so the support teams, in essence, became the first casualty of the robots.

Just as dystopian was how ­Atlassian delivered the news. It arrived as a link to a pre-recorded video of Cannon-Brookes, in a hooded jumper, speaking solemnly from a well-lit room in one of his many mansions.

Former CEO of Atlassian Scott Farquhar at the National Press Club in Canberra. Picture: Martin Ollman

A bit like Zuck, who’s obviously a cyborg, the only thing reassuringly human about the whole thing was that Cannon-Brookes appeared unshaven. “We will create a space for them to say goodbye,” he said of the affected workers, who were thereafter locked out of their laptops.   

Farquhar and Cannon-Brookes make no secret of veritably lying prostrate at the altar of AI advancement, making a mockery of the video’s title, Restructuring the CSS Team: A Difficult Decision for Our Future. There was nothing difficult about it. Smart people who were watching listened to Cannon-Brookes as he assured everyone these sackings would have no bearing on “any other roles” in the business. They listened, nodded, then duly swallowed an entire sack of salt.

Still on the board of Atlassian but addressing the room as Tech Council of Australia chair, Farquhar’s evangelism for AI was dialled up to 11 during his NPC address, describing it as “transformative”, a “defining technology of our time”, and urging AI’s take-up as “core economic infrastructure” by business and government.

A televised speech with AI at its heart surely counts as a moment of magnitude in Farquhar’s career. On that basis alone it’s so tantalising to wonder why Cannon-Brookes chose this day, of all days, to sack a bunch of people because of AI advances. Farquhar was asked about the sackings during the press club Q&A, and of course every news website ran the story and drowned out his message, even the TnA specialists at the Daily Mail (who went with the hysterical headline, ‘Rise of the Machines’). Maybe that was Cannon-Brookes’s point all along. 

Or maybe it was itself a subtle dig that Farquhar spoke of AI in the context of development approvals for residential property, a topic he conceded first-hand experience and disappointment.

Which is funny, because the reason Farquhar abandoned the redesign of his $130m Point Piper mansion, Elaine, wasn’t because of any prohibitive cost or pesky DA application, or some irritant at the council raising the plight of a rare tree frog. It was held up in large part by the objections of the a … hole couple living in Fairwater, the house next door: Mike and Annie Cannon-Brookes.

Mike and Annie Cannon-Brookes. Picture: Caroline McCredie/Getty Images

Cannon-Brookes looked properly funereal walking into the press club, practically scowling into the biting Canberra wind and trailed by his posse of Atlassian hype girls, including chief-of-staff Amy Glancey, a rumoured source of the division with Farquhar, and executive assistant Faye Sterling, a source of covert power in the company with a wholly misleading title.

Atlassian Chief-of-Staff Amy Glancey at the National Press Club. Picture: Martin Ollman

You have to wonder why the billionaire would bother to bring his EA to a speech in Canberra, or even turn up with the protection of an entourage. 

Considering his absence from Farquhar’s send-off as co-CEO last year, the sighting of him at all, seated next to Farquhar, was supposed to stand in defiance of the reported froideur between them. Farquhar addressed that in a morning interview with the ABC, laughing off the claim. He called it “inaccurate”, which never sounds as bulletproof as the more muscular “wrong”, or “false”.

It’s a bit like throwing a dart at the bullseye and seeing it land just off target; imprecise, but close enough. “I think in this situation some of the news about Mike and myself has been overblown,” Farquhar said. And depending on how you squint at that, he’s said enough already. 

Welcome gift status

Further to a question we asked on Tuesday about Equality Australia and how it very suddenly achieved DGR status in Labor’s most recent budget, we now learn of some relevant political linkages that could close the gaps on this mystery. 

For those out of loop, Equality Australia was thrice rejected from registering itself as a Public Benevolent Institution, a designation that would have given it a pathway to Deductible Gift Recipient, or DGR status, which enables donors to make pledges and thereby lower their taxable income (and thereby donate even more).

Rejected by the charities regulator for PBI status, Equality Australia went to the Admin­istrative Appeals Tribunal, which sided with the regulator, and the then Full Court of the Federal Court, which also sided with the regulator.

Equality Australia CEO Anna Brown, an ex-Labor staffer, then wrote to Anthony Albanese’s Charities Minister, Andrew Leigh, in November, and he quickly put an end to the legal heartache, signing off on the DGR status within a few weeks. By the end of January, Equality Australia was minted.

We wondered at what motivated Leigh to act so nimbly on this request, and perhaps it’s Brown’s association with Albanese’s chief of staff, Tim Gartrell, who worked so closely with Brown on the Yes Equality campaign for same-sex marriage reform in 2016.

Anna Brown, front left, working on the Yes Equality campaign with Tim Gartrell, second from right

Brown was co-chair of the campaign, and both she and Gartrell were personally thanked by Penny Wong during her second reading speech for the 2017 Marriage Amendment Bill. Enough said?

So when Brown writes to Leigh asking for help to leapfrog Equality Australia to DGR status over the better judgment of a regulator, a tribunal and the Full Court of the Federal Court, it’s safe to wonder if the Prime Minister’s Office might not have helped push along the request. What are friends for, right?