"There it is a positive debate, with everyone moving in roughly the same direction, but it seems that in Australia people are still playing politics rather than doing what is right for the country.

"It is very clear that while the willingness is still there [among businesses] the topic is not being embraced by nearly as many people because innovation has been portrayed as a taker of jobs, rather than as a purveyor of growth."

Treading too warily

The Google chief's negative views on the Australian government's rhetoric around innovation mirror those expressed by Atlassian co-founder Mike Cannon-Brookes at last week's Australian Financial Review Business Summit. The Sydney-based tech billionaire accused the government of burying its head in the sand about the impact of innovation on some jobs in order to avoid putting voters offside, despite the evidence that earlier eras of tech advances had led to a greater number of jobs overall.

"It's gone off the boil, we had a whole election where [innovation] basically wasn't mentioned. I get that as a politician [protecting votes] is kind of what you have to do, but as a leader of the country you have to do the opposite," Mr Cannon-Brookes said.

Atlassian's Mike Cannon-Brookes: "I've learned a lot of the dark arts of power, both political and electric, over the past few days." Louise Kennerley

Mr Temsamani said Australia found itself in a fortuitous position due to its position as a gateway to Asia, and that existing and emerging businesses needed to position themselves to take advantage. He said Google had recognised Asia Pacific was becoming the centre of the world in terms of being a leading indicator of consumer behaviour, and provided a far more lucrative growth profile for many expanding Australian organisations than the US or Europe.

He said the adoption of digital services across Asia was so advanced that companies – particularly in the media sector – needed to analyse consumption in the region, in order to understand how they should be reforming their own products.


Google's most popular apps are used more in Asia than anywhere else. On a per-capita basis the Philippines is the world's biggest user of Google Photos, Malaysia is the biggest user of its messaging apps and three of the top five countries using the Google Play store are Asian.

Switch focus to the north

"The centre of the world is really shifting very quickly to Asia Pacific. It is shifting from a money perspective when you look at household wealth ... and there is a real big shift also regarding where decisions are being made," Mr Temsamani said.

"Australia should see being part of the Asia Pacific region as a way to learn faster about these trends and not look to the West for where innovation is going to come from in future. Companies should also look to Asia for where they want to export technology, products or services from Australia."

Google executives have been reticent to venture opinions on matters of national growth and prosperity in recent years due to ongoing controversy about the amount of tax it pays in the different countries it operates.

2017 is the first year for Australia's Multinational Anti-Avoidance Law (MAAL), also known as the Google Tax, which came into operation on January 1 last year, but Mr Temsamani said the company was looking forward to a global resolution on issues related to tax.

He said national schemes would have little impact, and said any global agreement would be well received as it would allow the company to speak more about its tech investments and projects rather than debating tax laws.

"Most of our IP and our risk is sitting in the US at the moment, so that is where we pay most of our taxes, and over the last few years we have paid close to 20 per cent with regards to our global income," he said


Cloud Platform expands

"Unless changes are agreed at a global level no changes will really make much difference ... We agree that there should be tax reform, but we agree that it is something that the OECD needs to resolve together, and that we will comply with the decisions that those countries make."

One area that Mr Temsamani is expecting to see notable growth in Australia in the year ahead is the uptake of its Google Cloud Platform. Last year the company announced that it would launch a local presence for its service that competes against Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure. Local users currently have to agree to their data and systems being hosted offshore, putting Google at a disadvantage.

A date for the opening of its Sydney is not yet known, but Mr Temsamani said he was confident it was not too far behind its rivals in Australia.

"It is absolutely core to our CEO's Sundar Pichai's strategy ... we have been investing dramatically in building our teams and in cloud infrastructure it is one of the biggest things we are doing in terms of capex in the region," he said.

"Amazon has been very successful and you hear more from them in the media because they are focused on the larger businesses, whereas we have been more with small and medium-sized organisations, [but] we are going to continue focusing on those businesses while having some discussion with larger organisations."