The folks behind Google's Summer of Code, LinuxFund, bounty-hacker.org,
the Gnome Bounties, the Ubuntu Bounties all seem to agree with the general
concept too.
But in all of those cases, that is their mission, or they have a bucketload
of money already. That's great for them, but I don't believe "paying people
to write Free Software" is the best use of LA's resources, focus or time
when it comes to "supporting the Free Software community in Australia". We
have much better things to focus on that other organisations are not already
doing.