AFR: Government's Cyber Policy Overhyped and Underfunded

This article by Revium Managing Director Adam Barty was first published in the Australian Financial Review - you can read the full article here.

Don’t believe the hype: while the $1 billion tax break for digital spending announced by Josh Frydenberg in the Federal Budget was pumped up as a way to help firms improve their cyber security readiness, it falls scarily short of the mark. That’s a big problem for Australian business.

The announcement was more about making headlines in the lead up to an election than being part of a considered, structured, long-term cyber security strategy. If anything, in an increasingly digital-dependant world, it serves to highlight the government’s complete failure over a long period of time to properly address the ever-growing security challenges businesses are facing.

The tax break comes off the back of a much vaunted, but incredibly underwhelming Cyber Security Strategy released by the Federal Government in August 2020. At the time, the government said cyber security incidents were costing Australian businesses $29 billion a year. As part of the new strategy, it committed a grand total of $1.67 billion to fix the problem, spread over 10 years. That equates to $167 million a year. In other words, the government planned to fix the problem of cyber crime by investing less than half a percent of what the problem is actually costing the country... 

Read the rest of the article on the AFR website by clicking here.