Australia Day honours: ‘Bad actors’ threaten business, says Catherine Livingstone

Catherine Livingstone, who has been made a Companion of the Order of Australia, warns that companies should not try to go it alone in handling cyber attacks.

Business veteran Catherine Livingstone has been recognised in the 2024 Australia Day honours with an AO. Picture: Martin Schumann

Business and government need to work together more closely to combat the growing danger of cyber attacks, says UTS chancellor and businesswoman Catherine Livingstone.

She said there needed to be a “joint effort” across organisations and government to pool more information about cyber attacks if Australia was to have a hope of combating “bad actors” who were constantly developing new ways to exploit society’s growing reliance on the internet.

In an interview with The Australian, Ms Livingstone, who has been made a Companion of the Order of Australia in this year’s Australia Day honours, warned companies should not try to go it alone in handling cyber attacks.

“Pooling experiences and understanding of systems is the only way we are going to get to the point of being able to address the challenge (of cyber attacks),” she said.

“Bad actors are always one step ahead, but it is a priority that we should become more resilient (against cyber attacks) across the whole economy.

“The intensity of the need for everyone to work together on this has really increased.”

A former chair of Telstra and the Commonwealth Bank and president of the Business Council of Australia, Ms Livingstone is now chancellor of Sydney’s UTS, chair of freight company ­Pacific National, and a director of medical equipment manufacturer Saluda Medical, Quasar Satellite Technologies, the Australian Ballet, and Australian Design Council.

A trained accountant, her early corporate career saw her become chief executive of bionic ear company Cochlear, a spin off from the CSIRO, which she ran for six years, from 1994 to 2000.

Ms Livingstone was awarded an AC for “eminent service to business, particularly through governance and strategic reform, to tertiary education, science, technology and innovation capability development and the arts”.

She said cyber security was an issue across the community from business, universities and researchers to hospitals, medical ­facilities, and government.

She also said it was an issue which now required society to invest “huge resources to maintain security in the face of these bad ­actors”.

Ms Livingstone, who has been chancellor of UTS since 2016, said she would also like to see universities and businesses work more closely together to develop more skilled workers and co-operate on research projects.

But she said the problem was that business leaders often had shorter cycles than in universities.

“Universities are a huge contributor to the economy,” she said.

“The intellectual capital of the country is now coming out of universities. We need more innovation because we need more productivity. Universities are a crucial part of the innovation value chain for the country.

“But you can’t do anything if you don’t have the people.”

She said there were good examples where business and universities did work together including on areas like resources and medical research institutes.

But she said the “cycle time of the turnover of senior people in business is faster than the cycle time of projects and research in universities”.

“Someone in business might start a relationship with a university and it is all working well, but the person gets promoted or moves to a different organisation and you lose your champion on the business side,” she said. “The research project still goes on but, without the champion in business, the relationship falls away.”