Keynote speaker for Free Play 2005 was Greg Costikyan. From the Freeplay website, he was "inducted into the Adventure Gaming Hall of Fame for a lifetime of accomplishment in the field... designed more than 30 commercially published board, roleplaying, computer, online, and mobile games over a 30 year career."
As a consultant on game industry business issues, Greg had this to say about local game development from his time at Free Play and the local IGDA Melbourne chapter...
A general concern of Australian developers seems to be that they're viewed by the game industry mainly as a relatively cheap place to do ports; not that much original development gets funded there. And as more experienced developers emerge in Asia and Eastern Europe, the fear is that this work ultimately goes to even lower-cost development centers, with the future of the Australian development community at risk unless they can produce their own strong, independent developers who control their own IP. (In North America, sustainable development communities have traditionally emerged in two ways: either through the success of one strong developer that trains people and spawns new startups [id in Dallas, Origin in Austin, Microprose in the Baltimore-DC-NVa corridor], or by one of the major publishers deciding to build a large studio in the area [EA/Tiburon in Orlando, Ubisoft in Montreal, EA again in Vancouver].)