Ann: Annual Report to shareholders, page-34

Have you any idea of the degree of difficulty that these cybersecurity employees face on a daily basis? It is a war, with the enemy continually probing extremely complex systems for vulnerabilities. Having had experience in the infancy of hacking I would liken it to a game of chess played by grandmasters. The salaries will increase but clients will pay. Each and every software engineer at TNT would be worth a dozen new IT graduates. And it's not as if the company does not appreciate these skills, with the newly established incentive share schemes plus a graduate academy of our own, where we can train up talent from Australia and NZ and reward those graduates who are the best of the best. I spent close to a year in the early 2000s remotely interviewing dozens of software engineers and coders from overseas to see if they could perform roles that we could find no Australian graduates for. And those jobs did not involve the level of skill required in this business. I would not even be capable of interviewing someone for such a role unless I still lived technology 24x7.

In the past decade, skilled IT graduates have been extremely hard to come by and Australia has been struggling to keep up with sufficiently skilled employees who have the most basic IT skills. For decades prior to COVID, it was appalling to see the less than minimum standards allowed by our tertiary institutions prior to COVID, where cheating and plagiarism were out of control so that they could graduate enough students to placate Australia's economic dependence on fees from overseas students. Any IT company worth its salt now conducts multiple technical interviews to ensure they get the expertise they are paying those high salaries for.