While the media and politicians continually argue over subsidies for car manufacturers and food makers, the struggles of the technology sector go unnoticed, writes Renai LeMay.

If you're a struggling company seeking financial aid from the Federal Government, you had better be making or growing some kind of visible, touchable product: something that will look good on TV as a backdrop to a political announcement.

Cadbury was able to pick up $16 million for its chocolate factory in Hobart. Huon Aquaculture won $3.5 million to upgrade its fishery equipment. And although Holden and SPC Ardmona recently had funding packages rebuffed by the Abbott Cabinet, they still made a red hot go of it, with a war of words from all sides and blanket coverage by the media accompanied by a heart-rending backdrop of cars or tinned peaches rolling off production lines.

The key to starting a national debate about government subsidies of industry, it appears, is to be in an industry which does something tangible. Chocolate, tinned goods, cars - all viable options. Even better if you have an iconic brand which goes back to the days of Dad and Dave.

If you don't have this kind of product, then not only will your proposal not be seriously considered by the politicians in your sector - because there's no photo opportunity - but worse, it won't even be covered by the mainstream media. Instead, you'll be left going cap in hand to journalists working for industry-specific rags already favourable to your cause.

Take Australia's technology sector, for example. SPC Ardmona looks set to lose some 700 jobs following the government's funding rebuff this week, with thousands more jobs to be affected in flow-on industries, especially in the surrounding Goulburn and Murray Valley region. But surely this isn't that big of a deal? IBM alone was reportedly set to excise 1,000 or so local staff late last year in just one round of redundancies. And it's not the first time, either - Big Blue regularly knocks off many hundreds of Australian workers here or there. HP does the same, and so does Telstra and Optus.

Hell, during the global financial crisis, many of Australia's major technology companies culled hundreds of staff each, with the total number sliced ranging into the thousands - and those are just the ones we know about. No state of emergency was declared to keep those jobs.

The nation's major banks alone have shifted the jobs of thousands upon thousands of IT workers offshore over the past decade. ANZ Bank alone currently employs around 5,000 predominantly tech staff in its Bangalore facility in India.

Then there's the nation's video game industry, which used to be rapidly growing and putting on thousands of staff. It has been virtually obliterated over the past few years, with a string of high-profile closures including Krome Studios (about 200); THQ's Brisbane and Melbourne studios (200), Visceral Games (21), and two other high-profile closures in the form of Team Bondi and Brisbane's Pandemic Studios office.

Yet none of these cases were covered extensively by the mainstream media or considered by the Federal Government to be in desperate need of assistance.

The nation's technology workers and entrepreneurs also can't catch a break in terms of basic industry regulation to support their operations. The IT start-up sector - which has exploded with growth over the past five years - has been calling for basic reforms to employee share schemes for years that would allow early stage companies to offer their staff equity without the recipients being slugged with a massive tax bill for what are, often, worthless pieces of paper in the end. A few tax concessions to early stage companies to encourage the sector to grow also wouldn't hurt.

Success stories such as software giant Atlassian, frustrated by years of calls for basic regulatory relief, have shifted their headquarters to other countries such as the UK to avoid the government's business bureaucracy, and even locally listed successes such as Freelancer admit they face pressure to do the same.

On the flip side, multinational US titans operating in Australia are allowed to funnel billions out of the country while paying tiny tax bills, because the government has not followed our European cousins and found a way to block tax minimisation strategies like the so-called "Double Irish with a Dutch Sandwich" or even just basic offshore billing and transfer pricing. Apple Australia paid a whopping $36 million in tax off local revenues of $6 billion last year; for Google it was about $4.1 million off unofficial estimates of $1 billion.

SPC Ardmona is an important company and central to employment in its region. It has a strong Australian history and its case for subsidy should be considered seriously.

But it hardly seems logical that a massive, week-long media storm and political debate should be held over the fate of one rural fruit cannery while much larger structural issues in other industries are ignored. Manufacturing and food processing are not growth industries for Australia; in fact, they are continually shrinking. Yet the technology industry and associated sectors such as video game development clearly are. Knowledge work is continually increasing as a proportion of our GDP.

But then again, no politician wants to pose for photos in front of an office full of people sitting in front of computers. This has always been the problem of knowledge work: It just doesn't make good television.

Renai LeMay is the publisher of Delimiter, a media outlet focused on technology in the Australian context. View his full profile here.