The Australian Computer Society should be disbanded

This reflects pretty poorly on a country and government which supposedly is trying to shift from a "get stuff out the ground and sell it" to a knowledge economy...

I think the main problem is you need the accreditation if you want to apply to immigrate. As I understand it even if you are from overseas and study at a Australian university you would still need to get the accreditation to apply for a visa.

Accreditation is common in many industries in Australia, it's basically a huge racket. To legally do any wiring work at all it must be done by an accredited electrician, not merely inspected by one as in most countries. in fact most home improvements of any kind must be performed by an accredited tradesman. add to this the laws that state any home improvement must bring the entire house up to current building codes, it's a recipe for massive expenses that go straight into the pockets accredited tradesman.

This essentially prevents any person that owns older property from doing any upgrades, or major repairs at all, because the massive cost of upgrading the entire house at once is completely out of reach for most people. this leads to urban decay and property abandonment on a massive scale.

with the recent push by parties such as Apple, Microsoft, and Google to have registered developer programs complete with code signing, be very wary of industry wide pushes to introduce a similar thing for programmers. The IEEE has attempted to introduce the idea for years. you can be sure that soon after introduction laws forcing accreditation for many types of positions would shortly follow, as would subsequent rises in membership fees and requirements.

Not to mention the threat of only a certified developer being able to legally write code at all. this situation already exists in many engineering disciplines. with things like secure boot and locked bootloaders and signed code, it is almost a technical triviality.

want to know how general purpose computing will be killed? it will be via initiatives such as this.

Moving from commodity based, bricks and mortar investment focus to an abstract, information industry innovating mindset is a huge paradigm shift for most Australians. It has unfortunately been popular mantra that banking, real-estate, commodities or finance-oriented (to fund commodity) business is the bread and butter for a happy, future-proof life and not easy to break. Many people have done well under that mantra, by island standards. To put it another way, as a country of very few people, those with the power to control the narrative can, and do so, in servicing that agenda. It's shameful. John Howard's pontifications of Australia 'punching above its weight' were a painful misrepresentation and yet many continue to buy into such impoverished thinking.

For those unaware, this polemic is by Matt Barrie, CEO of Freelancer. He's been very outspoken in the Australian media about over-regulation of industry and outdated think tanks stifling innovation by recommending tactics that reinforce the status quo.