Today, the most significant and successful business figure Australia has produced in a generation will be doing something few of his predecessors in that position could have imagined.
He will be on strike at a protest rally.
Mike Cannon-Brookes, the billionaire co-founder of workplace software provider Atlassian is expected to be among the throng of attendees at a climate action rally in Sydney. About 400 of the software company’s employees are expected to join him, alongside potentially thousands of school and university students, union members and other workers. Similar rallies are taking place in Melbourne and all around the country.
Strikes are nothing new in Australia, of course. But for the observers of this country’s business scene old enough to remember the bitter industrial disputes of the not too distant past, the centre stage presence of a billionaire boss at one them may seem bizarre.
