This is an interesting proxy for ... something, though I'm not quite sure what.

I would say a bigger issue here is more cultural around our aversion to risk. This impacts funding (Need $2m for a house? no worries. Need $50k for a startup? You better have that house as collateral), but also impacts people's acceptance of business failure.

Despite that we do well on a few fronts - our government tech is quite good (I have an app that I can self-serve for most things like licenses, our taxes are auto-filled etc), we've had some interesting tech (Sel4, google maps I believe?, Radiata, some wifi tech if the CSIRO is to be believed)