The Information Gap

I appreciated your opening speech about mindset and framing, and the reason it resonated with me is because I've experienced it too. When I first came to Shenzhen with my mom, there were still children with their limbs chopped off begging for money on the streets. Having visited China year on year over the past decade, I've seen the transformation in front of my eyes. And then you go back to Australia and you see the narrative that still exists there about China. But you can't blame people too much, because what they see is through what they experience, what they experience is what gets brought to their attention, and most people don't have first-hand experience.

So when you talked about mental models, about how we believe what we see and what we see is shaped by what we experience and who we're surrounded by, I understood exactly what you meant. You said you were misinformed for years because of the narrative around you. It wasn't malicious. It was just what you were exposed to.

I want to apply that same lens to how APAC technology leadership thinks about Australia. Because I think there's a similar gap happening right now.

The view from Singapore

Most of the regional technology leadership resides in Singapore. Some are there to work for the region, some for specific countries, but the reality is the same: day-to-day, they're surrounded by people whose priorities align to Thailand, Malaysia, Korea, Hong Kong. Those are the conversations that fill the calendar. Those are the problems that land on the desk. Those are the faces everyone sees every day. That shapes attention. That shapes what feels urgent.

This is how attention works for everyone. It doesn't matter what the stated priorities are, because what actually gets attention is whoever walks up and says "this is happening, I need help." That's what captures focus, regardless of what was on the priority list that morning.

Australia is 50% of APAC's gross written premium, and yet in this week's agenda, we're barely a footnote. Not because anyone decided Australia doesn't matter, but because the people physically closest to Singapore are the ones whose problems land on leadership's attention.

The view from where we sit

Australia has no daily representation in the Singapore office. Our engineers, our product owners, our domain leads are 6,000 kilometres away, in a time zone that only overlaps with Singapore for about three hours a day.

In those three hours, our business leaders face an impossible choice. Do they spend that window working with their local team, upskilling the engineers they have direct control over, driving outcomes they can actually deliver, working on understanding our customers? Or do they spend it in regional alignment sessions, seeking cross-country consensus on decisions that may never resolve?

The honest answer is they try to do both, and neither gets the attention it deserves.

Here's the thing: the platform coupling we've created forces this trade-off. When a product team in Australia needs to make a change, they're dependent on platforms owned regionally. When platforms serve multiple countries, every decision becomes a negotiation. Every priority requires alignment across time zones and stakeholders who have different contexts, different urgencies, and different information.

The coupling is so heavy that even a simple change requires meetings across countries, and for Australia, those meetings happen in a compressed three-hour window where we're also trying to coordinate with India, run our own standups, and actually get work done. It's not sustainable.

What's missing from the regional view

When decisions get made regionally to save money, like changing L2 vendors or not renewing contracts, they make perfect sense from a cost perspective. These things all have good intentions at heart. But Australia then has to retrospectively figure out what to do.

Take our L2 team as an example. We're critically dependent on them, and over the past year they switched from one vendor to a different vendor. We spent the whole year upskilling and integrating that new team into how we work, only to now have to do that same exercise again with real uncertainty as to who we'll even have. The decision was made, and now we have to deal with it. But are we sure there's actually a business benefit through this overall scheme of things? Who is engaging Australia to understand what's actually required for business outcomes and customer experience? In most cases, no one has, and that's the gap. The information isn't flowing, and a big part of that is because the attention isn't there.

Here's the deeper issue: our technology strategies are set at a regional level. We're operating as a region. But the business is structured and funded at a country level. The technology strategy doesn't actually match how the business is structured and funded, and that mismatch creates friction that Australia feels acutely because we're the furthest away and have the least representation.

The 50% problem

Australia is half of APAC's business. If the region wants to grow successfully, the framing and priorities need to reflect that.

I'm not saying anyone is doing anything wrong. But if we want the mental model to include Australia's reality, we need to consciously create the conditions for that to happen. Because the default physics of day-to-day won't do it for us.

Does the five-year plan for APAC technology proportionally reflect Australia's contribution to the region? When we think about the top priorities for APAC, are half of them Australian priorities? When we think about where regional leadership's time goes, is half of it going to Australia's problems?

If the answer is no, that's the information gap, and it's not going to close on its own.

What I'm asking for

This isn't a complaint. It's an attempt to bridge an information gap.

There is a massive gap between the reality we experience in Australia and the reality experienced in Singapore. That gap isn't anyone's fault, it's just physics, time zones, and who is physically present every day. But the gap is real, and it affects how decisions get made for a business that represents half of APAC.

The platform coupling, the decision-making that requires cross-country alignment, the three-hour time window, the lack of daily representation in Singapore: these are structural constraints that make Australia's reality very different from what's visible from Singapore. And the only way to bridge that gap is through conversation.

That's what I'm hoping we can do: not to assign blame, not to demand solutions, but just to align on the reality first, so that when we do talk about what to do, we're starting from the same place.