"Why not try and grow the biggest line of tax, income tax, by encouraging people to study in the right areas like science and engineering, instead of making these cuts which will push the cost of an electrical engineering degree at UNSW above $34,000, while slashing the HECS repayment threshold at the same time," Mr Barrie said.

The neglect of education had seen the number of students studying information technology fall by as much as 60 per cent over the last decade, Mr Barrie said, with enrolments also falling for maths, science and chemistry.

"Engineering is up a little but this is over a decade where the number of undergraduates overall has risen 40 per cent - this is an absolute crisis when you consider Estonia teaches its students to code from the age of seven."

The government needed to urgently convince Australians that their economy needed to take a more technological course - he suggested John F. Kennedy's Apollo program, which eventually put a man on the moon, as a template for winning hearts and minds - but instead there was complacency according to Mr Barrie.

'My mind was seriously blown'

"When the chief scientist of Australia sat [at the Summit earlier today] and said an iron ore mine is every bit as innovative as a semiconductor fabrication plant, my mind was seriously blown," Mr Barrie said.

"Throw as much AI and robotics at an iron ore mine as you like, it doesn't change the fact that mines are and always will be wasting assets, their output a commodity for which we are a price taker - and once their finite resource is gone, their robots will be dormant."

On the other hand a semiconductor plant made automation at that mine possible, not only for that mining business but every new business as it emerged.


"Technology is the greatest wealth and productivity multiplier there is," Mr Barrie said.

He named the example of Apple, whose $215 billion annual revenue equates to $2 million per employee per year.

Australia would be better off with an Indonesian system of government, where the president was able to handpick domain experts for each portfolio.

"In Australia you end up with ministers who've got no idea about their portfolios, so they politick instead," he said.

He pointed out that Freelancer.com had 26 million users and was governed by a board of three people, where Australia had 24 million people governed by 840 members of parliament.

"They are meant to represent what their communities are thinking and feeling - frankly you could could get rid of them all and do that with a smartphone app," he said.

Nurturing more technology-minded people and creating more global technology companies was the best way Australia could arrest its dramatic slide in Harvard University's 'economic complexity' index.

"It's a measure of how many different products an economy produces, and how many of those are able to be produced by other countries," Mr Barrie said.

It is an index where mining coal marks a country down and making cars marks them up, so Mr Barrie said it was "depressingly inevitable" that Australia had fallen further down its rankings than any other country over the last decade.

"We're worse than Botswana, Saudi Arabia, Guatemala, poised delicately between Kazakhstan and Jamaica at number 77," he said.

"If that's not a statistic to scare a nation into action I don't know what is."