TRANSCRIPT:
(This transcript is derived from an automated process. The video recording is authoritative.)
Dev Shankar:
Thanks all. I'll start with the namaste, the Indian way, where we great everybody, and I'll try and see if I can find the next slide to give you a bit of perspective.
So that's India, that's Australia, that's where I come from on the west coast of India in a small city called Mumbai where we have a population of about 30 million, give and take couple of million. And I started the journey, I think in 1996 when the bug hit me that I want to go and see the world started somewhere in the Middle East.
After that, someone said, there's a job for you in Brisbane and Australia. I said, great. After that I ended up somewhere in Papua New Guinea, saw a bit of Kazakhstan, Russia, and after that, I think landed up in India where I left the big four accounting firm as a partner. And I thought, I'll try and do something entrepreneurial.
Tied up with a few other partners and we started a nice little billion fund, which went well until the global financial crisis happened, and I think it was May, 2011 when things started going down south and India in terms of the economy and everything like that. So we had to get our daughters started with education and boom, there you go. In Jan 2012, we landed up out here, wife, me and my 6-year-old daughter, wonderful, started with the education and sorry, this little map, I thought I'll throw it out there because when I asked an average person, what's the distance between India and Australia? There's always 5,000, 10,000 or 15,000 kilometres, but technically as the crow flies is just two and a half to 2,600 kilometres. That's the distance between the islands, which are Indian owned and Australian sovereign territory. So from a trade perspective, when I threw this out at the Indo-Pacific Regional Dialogue, a lot of the maritime and the Navy admirals and all were a bit confused when I gave them a different perspective saying, you know what, Australian India, just two and a half thousand kilometres apart, that's what we need to bother about.
So it becomes a bit difficult when an average person tries to understand where do these migrants come from? No, we don't come from a boat. Not everybody jumps on a boat and comes here. So I thought, I'll ask the question, what is the background of a skilled migrant? I asked myself, and I asked this to myself, I think in 2002, just before John Howard decided Australia's going to participate in the war in Iraq, I looked up the profile, okay, chartered accountant, it takes off. So I ended up submitting my application to become a permanent resident. The approval came in three months, but by the time I could get my PR visa, it was six months because the war had started in Iraq. But at that time I was still with Deloitte and everything was looking good. Success is a journey I guess, that everyone needs to enjoy.
So it was all going positively until another bug bit me. And I said, okay, I've become a partner of Deloitte in the Australian practise. Now what? I need to try and find something better. So that's where I asked myself, what's the concept of success? And many people say, you've got to be a successful migrant, either if you have a billion dollars in your bank account or if you look like an Indian, you possibly have 50 or a hundred taxis out there. Or if you're an Indian in America, you possibly own about a hundred motels out there. So in fact, I got a friend of mine who we met in 2012, so he's sitting out there quietly. His story is a wonderful success story in its own way. He started with yoga and fitness and whatnot, and today he is selling a lot of wonderful steak and meat.
So everybody has their own journey. And while I looked at the journey of successful migrants, I remember in 2013 I was doing an event for a large multinational from India, and they wanted my help to do a roadshow in Brisbane and in Townsville at that time, I met a young student who was running a little spice store near the gaba, just near the Cooper RSL, and it was like a three metre by three metre shop, and the student was all enthusiastic. He said, oh, I know what I would like to attend your event to the multinational. I said, great.
Now his story, why I'm telling you is because in 2013, he had a small three metre by three metre shop selling spice stores. Today he owns eight big supermarkets in southeast Queensland. Between him and his business partner, they employ more than 250 people. He has his partner now based in India. They're buying a large ship because they want to export a lot of the red kidney beans and sprouts and other agricultural products from Queensland to India and bring in all the wonderful spices and curries that everyone loves out here. The concept of success, it varies, depends on whom you talk to doctors. I know some doctors who have done some fantastic things before covid, during Covid and after Covid, they've been involved. In fact, one helped me in 2018 when the Indian high Commissioner called me on a Monday morning and he said, I need your agent help.
He said What for? He said, I need those vaccines. Queensland has some vaccines for NEPA in India. Who is nepa? Is it a male, a female who is nepa? He said, no, it's a bloody virus. It's come out of bats. I said, okay. So I had to run through the whole Queensland Department of Health system in 72 hours, and thankfully I managed to get in touch with Professor Paul Young who got me the Hendra virus antibodies and those who know the Hendra virus in the nineties was a crazy thing. So those antibodies ended up reaching India, and within five days, I managed to beat the entire bureaucratic system who said, it'll take three months. I got it pushed and it went through. So I mean, sounds a bit bragging, but there's so much of collaboration that's possible. The other thing I wanted to bring out also today it's been a bit topical.
I think it's more political hot potato as to whether immigrants should be allowed into Australia, how many immigrants should be allowed, how many should not? And this morning thanks to Joel, I was on the a BC radio chat where I told Steve Austin last year's number of 700,000 plus migrants actually shocked me. Those numbers are crazy. Why I say that is because I have a 19-year-old daughter who's growing up out here and I see her generation. I see Josh out here, I see a couple of youngsters when they need to buy their houses, are they going to be able to put their deposit out there? How is the next generation in 10, 20 years going to survive in this country? If we are going to get 700,000 migrants per annum, what are they going to do? I mean, when I came here, I think the migration policy was 60 or 70,000 migrants per annum, and that's what I do.
Lachlan, maybe the 700 thing needs to be brought down to 70, bring it down to a hundred thousand. Now, a lot of the political conversation I'm hearing from the left and the right, sorry, I'll kind of throw this in here. I have put my hand up to become a member of the Libertarian Party. Those who don't know about the libertarian party, they were the liberal Democrats and now the libertarian party is growing a lot in membership. And the reason I put my hand up over there and I'm involved in the state executive and we just launched a branch last week in Brisbane East, is because I thought I can sit on the fence and whinge about all these things, or I can roll my sleeves up like a true block. Aussie does jump into the bridge out there and start doing things and make the changes that are required.
So whether it's migration policy, whether it's taxation, whether it's the bureaucracy, whether it's a red tape, there are so many things that I have seen that have gone wrong in the past 20, 25 years that have been in Australia. It kind of scares me that when I get into so-called retirement, I'm turning 55 pretty soon, and when I go into whatever is called retirement in 20 years time, I don't know what this country will look like and I don't want it to look like something from the Middle East or something. What's happening in UK or what's happening in Europe. And if I don't contribute to protecting the future of this country, who's going to do it? No one's going to jump on a boat and come and help us out here. We have Locklin is one of our wonderful candidates for the Senate from libertarian party.
He's thrown his hand up and he's working pretty hard over there. So it goes back to the question of the past. Policies of migration have been driven by a series of factors. You need skilled migrants. It depends on what kind of skills, chartered, accountants, doctors, carpenters, plumbers, disparities, and there is enough supply in the country. But the question is, where is the supply going? What's happening to the education system of the country? Are we going to have the right graduates coming out in 10, 20 years or are we going to have guys who are going to be told by the government, you do this because we have trained you to do this? And in fact, I'll digress a bit out here to steal Lachlan's thunder. And one of the good information he threw out in the past few days, the Australian government across all three levels, council to state to federal across the country has two million five hundred thousand five hundred and seventeen thousand employees.
On the payroll we have 2.517 bureaucrats managing and governing a population of 25, 20 6 million people. And the cost to the taxpayer is 232 billion per annum. That's two thirds of the cost of Aus deal for 20 years in one year, 232 billion. And funny thing he threw another statistic is what were the British doing during the colonial era? The British had only 40,000 people running the entire British Empire, and we have two and a half million Australians taking care of 25 million Australians. I'll leave it over there. I want to shock you guys more. And this is an analogy I want to share because couple of months ago I was an India talking at the end of Pacific Regional Dialogue, and this is all about critical minerals and the supply chain of critical minerals, the geopolitics that's involved and how China is trying to control the supply chain of geopolitical influence and how they're weaponizing the supply chain of critical minerals.
And Australia's gifted with all of this. Now, I saw an analogy of all of these critical minerals floating on a wonderful ocean of copper that Australia needs migrants to come together like critical minerals. Every migrant is critical to Australia. It depends on where you come from, what you bring to the table. If you're going to be running a gang book, the guys send them back to where they come from. Why? Because we don't want a society that's becoming rampant with corruption, rampant with gangs and running with the mobs and all that. And I'm possibly being a bit biassed, but thankfully in Brisbane we haven't seen some crazy stuff of what's happening in Melbourne and Sydney. I may be wrong, but those who've been here long enough can help me out over there.
I it's important. I shared the question of migrants from my own journey perspective. I've thrown up a few things out there and I've climbed the ladder up here in the big four accounting firm in Australia. I've trained a few chartered accountants along my journey. I've set up a couple of chapters of the C Institute. I've set up my own consultancy. I participated in the G 20 summit in 2014. In 2015, the prime minister, Papua New Guine told me to jump on a flight with him for the summit that they had. There was the knee power virus I told you of. And in 2020 when Omo said he's not going to hold the hose for the fires because he was busy somewhere else and China was hammering Australia economically where they literally banned all the exports and said, we are not going to take it. I asked myself, what can happen?
Oh, hang on. I come from India. There's one and a half billion people out there who can buy a lot of stuff from Australia, whether it's mining, whether it's agriculture. So there was a think tank I was involved in, or rather I accidentally set up a think tank with a WhatsApp group of six people, three retired generals and three business people of us. And today we have about 174 people in there, retired generals, admirals and ambassadors and academia. And through that WhatsApp group, I pushed hard for the comprehensive strategic partnership to be quickly signed between Australia and India because that had been sitting on the back bench for a while. So that thing got signed up on 4th of June. That opened up a lot of other opportunities. A lot of Indian students who were stranded out here, they wanted to go back during Covid again. Schmo said, you're all on your own.
The government's not going to do anything. So I put my hand up and I started some repatriation flights, got all the approvals and 48, 72 hours. And of course the last but not least is engaging with Aus trade defect and trade investment Queensland. Because ultimately the best thing an immigrant can do is try and see how we can grow business between we come from and the adopted country. So I have my motherland, I have my Fatherland, and I'm stuck in between what do I do? What am I doing out here? And I'll use my contacts. I got so much of these contacts through the think tanks where I've grown. Mumbai is the financial capital of India. So I thought, you know what? I'll do something. So while all these agreements were done up and our wonderful friend Albo decided to go to India, just post Covid.
Now why I threw this photo up is because a lot of people in the Australian defence sector have spoken to, they said, oh, India is, you know what predominantly Russian stuff and you guys are all Russia and all that. Now that's Albo sitting in an aircraft fully designed, built in India, the light combat aircraft. And that's sitting on an aircraft carrier again, fully designed and developed by India and put out there by India. So the reason Albu was allowed to go there, and he was the first head of state who was actually taken on board an Indian warship. Normally they don't do it for protocol is because they wanted to tell Australia, listen, we are across this big ditch called the Indian Ocean, which is about 7,000 kilometres apart tomorrow. Shit hits the fan. We got to take care of each other. And India has a lot in terms of weapons and equipment and all that.
And just to give you a perspective like the bureaucracy, Australia has six submarines. One is operational, three of them are going through reef freight. One is having some corrosion and some fungus thing being sorted out in Perth and Fremantle. So we got one submarine taking care of a massive continent and our sea lines of communication, which is our trade. So I'm just giving you guys some perspectives of how as an immigrant, I'm saying, hang on, I came to this country which was all great successful and it was all tied up with itself. And now I'm seeing submarines are falling apart, stuff is falling apart, politicians are falling apart. Oh dear, don't get me started. So I've done a few other things. I've signed some MOUs. The first one, why I got that going is because I saw a potential for business to business collaboration at the government to government level.
The guys in defects said they were not getting anywhere in Delhi. I pulled my business contacts together, I got a wonderful MOU going between the Australian defence industry. So there's a lot of conversations going on on the technology side, whether it's drones, whether it's electronic warfare capabilities. A lot of the guys from Defence South Australia, when I told them about India launching 110 satellites in 10 minutes in one spaceship, they said, no, it's not true. I said, check it out. When they checked it out, they said, how soon can we meet these guys in India? So it's a question of how you create the awareness. And I'm thankful to Joel that she's given me this opportunity. I don't know how much more time I have, Joel, but I'm going to try and run through the slides. A few minutes I'll start wrapping up. And the last one at the bottom.
Now that's something I really brag about finding Project A one. Can I ask how many of you know the acronym for ae? One, two Hands, three hands. In 2016, my daughter's school friend came to me and he said, Maddie, can you help me raise one and a half million? I pulled up my wallet. I said, sorry, Matt, I got a few change. Only one thing led to another. And he put me in touch with Rare Admiral Peter Briggs, who was the chairman of Project Finding a one. And he told me there's a submarine from Australian fleet, which was lost in World War I in 1914. I managed to put a few things together, got Paul Allen, who is a co-founder of Microsoft, the late Paul Allen. He got his big super yacht into the waters of Papua New Guinea. And in now 2017, we found a E one. It was submerged at 300 metres depth out there.
This is a photograph that was taken of me launching the defence vertical in the Australia India Chamber of Commerce with Admiral General Peter Cosgrove. And I liked what he said. He said he won the Each team award because of the one year of training he did at the National Defence College in India, because that gave him the whole strategy perspective and that helped him a lot. So there are a lot of things that we don't know, and I learned a few things from General Peter Cosgrove also. It's just amazing. I thought I'll share some photos of some successful immigrants. Sheara Vike. She's the CEO of Macquarie. She earns a little bit about 30 million per annum. Robin Kuda, he is a Bangladeshi who came here and set up Air trunk just a few months ago. He did a small deal of an investor from the US putting about 24 billion into his company, Dave s Shema.
Everybody knows he's a senator. Professor Venus Ser. She's in the University of New South Wales. She's come up with some fantastic green technologies. I think everybody knows Frank Louis. Everybody knows Bond and the Prat family. These are some immigrants who have come here, created wealth, created jobs. And it's a question of who do you define as an immigrant? What do you want from them? Some of the sectors that immigrants have contributed that I have seen it sent to your day-to-day banking and superannuation defence infrastructure, small businesses. I was talking to Dominic Lamb, the Commissioner for small business, and she said there's 480,000 small business across Queensland, predominantly owned by immigrants, creating jobs, paying their taxes, but doing it the hard way. So that's me standing in front of the Brumos missile, which is a supersonic missile, which unfortunately none of the radar systems in the world are still able to track it and capture it.
And when I asked someone in Canberra, does Australia do anything with this, can we buy some of these? They said, how do we get them? I said, I'll put you onto somebody who can tell you guys how to get them. I'll quickly run through this. I think I spoke about the cooperation agreements. I've been involved with beef, everybody who sees me, Indian, Hindu, oh, you don't eat beef? I said, yeah, I love it. Medium red. I love it with a bit of a red wine. Shiraz please. And I come from South India, predominantly those who don't know South India, Tamal, lado state especially. There was a report put out by University of New South Wales and Adelaide University that 4,300 years ago that there's a direct a hundred percent DNA match between those who come from that part of South India and the indigenous people of Australia. So I would like to say, welcome to my country, Australia.
That's a deep sea ocean thing that goes on. India is taking it 6,000 metres down the line. They are working with C-S-I-R-O and some serious technologies are being developed. I won't go into this, but it's basically the churn of the ocean to try and extract the nectar, which is equivalent to what the critical minerals are. But the essence of this is currently there's a massive festival going on in North India where in 46 days, 400 million tourists are coming from across the world to do a holy dip into the waters where apparently the holy nectar fell. And this event happens once in 144 years when the seven planets align together. So Indian science and technology goes back to thousands of years, but that's for another day. Everybody knows about the court. In fact, there is a court event happening now that Trump has been signed in.
He said he is going to boost up the court as much as possible. Those of you who know what Kevin Rudd did in 2007, he pulled Australia out of the court, allowing China to do what they had to do. And Rudd said that he knows China much better than anybody else because he speaks Mandarin. I dunno Mandarin, but I know China. Anyway, thanks a lot. I thought I'll wrap it up with the word hanau. Warna, which is more a Sanskrit slogan to say, may the gods of the oceans be good on us. And since Australia's this massive continent with water around it, God bless Australia and the waters bless Australia. Thank you.
