Spend enough time around Indigenous participation in technology and you start to notice something odd. There has never been more talent coming through
There have never been more organisations willing to say, in writing, that they want to work with First Nations businesses. And still, the two keep missing each other.
The reservoir is full. The problem was never the water. It is the plumbing.
Start with what is working, because plenty is. In August, the Department of Industry, Science and Resources relaunched its STEM Equity Monitor, giving us the clearest national picture we have had of where First Nations people sit across the pipeline, from school through to the workforce. That same month, CSIRO committed $1.5 million to a new scholarship programme with the University of Newcastle, backing Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students into STEM and clean-energy careers: up to a hundred scholarships over its life. As Bandjin woman and Pro Vice-Chancellor Loren Collyer put it, scholarships like these tell Indigenous students they belong in STEM.
They do. And so do the businesses those students go on to build. First Nations firms are already delivering in cyber security, software, data and digital training, with real capability and real ambition.
The demand side is moving too, and more of it is being written down. The Commonwealth’s Indigenous procurement target has climbed to three per cent of contract value and keeps rising towards four per cent by 2030. From July this year, the rules tightened so that only genuinely First Nations-owned businesses qualify. Corporate Australia is following. Optus launched its Innovate Reconciliation Action Plan this year with an explicit commitment to grow First Nations business procurement and supplier diversity, backed by a public target of $14 million in First Nations supplier spend by 2030. Commitments like these are exactly what the moment needs.
Here is the uncomfortable part.
This month, the federal government quietly stopped counting. The 1.2 million technology jobs promised by 2030, the one target the Department of Industry, Science and Resources had not met, has been dropped from its latest Corporate Plan. The Australian Computer Society’s most recent Digital Pulse tells you why it stings: in 2025, Australia’s technology workforce shrank for the first time. I am not here to mourn a number. Its quiet exit is clarifying, because filling a reservoir was never the same as connecting it.
The same lesson holds closer to the ground.
Filling the reservoir, and signing the commitments to draw on it, does not move a single contract on its own. Only around one in five First Nations people who study IT go on to work in it. For everyone else, it is closer to one in two. That is the widest gap of any sector, and it is not a shortage of ability or ambition. It is what happens after the qualification: the pathways, the introductions, the doors that open for some and not for others.
The same is true one level up. Capable Indigenous businesses never find their way to the government buyers holding the targets, or the prime suppliers carrying the obligations.
That is the plumbing. And it is the part almost nobody funds, because it is less visible than a scholarship and less quotable than a target. A pledge in a Reconciliation Action Plan and a business ready to deliver can sit a few kilometres apart for years and never meet.
Fixing that is not complicated. But it has to be intentional.
It means putting Indigenous businesses in front of the government buyers and the technology suppliers who need them, in a room built for real conversations rather than another awareness morning. It means treating the connection itself as infrastructure. And it means someone taking responsibility for building it.
The reservoir is filling. The commitments are signed. The bridge between them is the part still missing, and it is the part we can choose to build.
Luli Adeyemo is the executive director of TechDiversity Foundation
