Page 4647 - Week 13 - Tuesday, 31 October 2017
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of Northrop’s worldwide cyber security centres of excellence. The visit to Northrop in Los Angeles allowed us to again explain our commitment to growing the defence, cyber and space industries in Canberra and to encourage Northrop to continue to invest in our city.
The difficulty of attracting and retaining skilled staff, especially software and computer engineers, was raised by Northrop as an issue holding back its growth in Canberra. This was also raised by other parties that we met with during the trip. Whilst it is a world-wide problem, it is a particular issue for Canberra where competition for skilled people between the national security agencies and the private sector is fierce and is driving up salaries.
A number of innovative solutions to this challenge are currently being developed. For example, the investment of $12 million by the Australian Signals Directorate into the ANU’s College of Engineering and Computer Science will provide a mechanism for students to undertake low security level work while completing their degrees and waiting for their security clearances. I understand that the CEO of Northrop in Australia is discussing increasing the supply of skilled personnel with both UNSW Canberra and the ANU. The ACT government is also looking at how we increase the supply in both the short and medium terms. Canberra’s education institutions, including the ANU, UNSW Canberra, the University of Canberra and the Canberra Institute of Technology, provide an opportunity for a collaborative pathway approach to skills development.
One of the clear messages from the trip was that not every skilled person needs to be at a PhD level; people with basic coding and software development skills can be trained on the job. We are also working with Northrop to pilot its cyber defender program in years 9 and 11 in Canberra schools in 2018-19 and working on our election commitment of the 2016 campaign for an academy of coding and cyber skills in 2019.
We also met with two space companies: Planet Labs and SpaceX. The public perception of the space industry is still, unfortunately, perceived as only being about space travel and space odysseys. Whilst it is true that in the early days the US and USSR governments were the drivers of the space industry, this is now no longer the case. In fact, the tipping point for the space industry occurred in 1998 when commercial activity in space overtook government activity for the first time. So two decades ago commercial activity overtook government activity in space.
The two companies we visited are two extremes of the commercial space industry. Planet Labs was founded in a garage in San Francisco in 2010 by three former NASA scientists, including Chris Boshuizen from Tumbarumba. Although Chris has now left Planet Labs, he remains committed to the development of the space industry and is on the advisory board for ANU’s Advanced Instrumentation and Technology Centre.
Since those humble beginnings in a garage in 2010, Planet Labs has grown to 400 employees and has raised over US$180 million in venture capital and equity funding. It now has nearly 200 small satellites in space and is providing an updated
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