Wyatt Roy (Longman, Liberal Party, Assistant Minister for Innovation) Share this | Hansard source

As we head that little bit further into 2016 I am deeply optimistic about the journey we are heading down as we drive the essential change that we need to see in the Australian economy as we transition our economy from one based on resources and on our traditional strengths to one that is far broader, embracing innovation and entrepreneurship in everything that we do. At the end of last year there was obviously an enormous amount of focus on innovation in our country. While that was incredibly exciting, the challenge for us in this election year and beyond is to ensure that innovation does not become the flavour of the month, something that is trendy but falls out of fashion in the months and years ahead.

While the incentive for politicians in this country is to find a point of difference—and certainly in an election campaign those pressures compile, and there is always a strong political incentive for different sides of this chamber to disagree to mark out a point of difference—I am deeply optimistic about our ability to rise to the very significant challenge for politicians on both sides of the political divide to come together and ensure that innovation and the essential discussion that our country needs to have about how we transition our economy in the decades ahead is something that we can see as a truly bipartisan national initiative. I think we have an enormous opportunity, a moment in history, for all of us in this place to agree—or certainly the two major parties in this place to agree—that there is a clear national imperative for us to embrace innovation in everything that we do, a clear recognition of the challenges that we face and of the challenges that we need to overcome when it comes to changing our culture and embracing a more entrepreneurial spirit in our collective psyche. We need to attract more capital to be invested into Australian innovation. We need greater collaboration and cooperation around the commercialisation of our incredible research in this country and we need to translate that and ensure that this incredible research is turned into businesses, products, ideas and services that change the world for the better. We need to grow our talent pool in this country and ensure that the next generation of Australians have the skill sets that they need in science and technology, in engineering, in mathematics and in digital technology—those entrepreneurial skill sets that they need to take hold of the opportunities of a changing global economy. In many cases we know that people my age and younger will be moving into jobs that do not yet exist. Clearly those skill sets are absolutely vital to them seizing the exciting opportunities of the future.

It is a very strange conversation for us to have, but how can government be an exemplar of innovation? How can we provide that hope to the private sector economy that we 'get it' here in Canberra, hopefully, and that government can be an exemplar of innovation? I think we have an incredible opportunity for both sides of this chamber to agree that these are the challenges that we have to overcome when we are creating a uniquely Australian innovation ecosystem. In this year, an election year, I hope we will see some competitive tension—which is very different to overt partisanship—a contest of ideas around how we can overcome those challenges.

But surely, after the political environment that we have all lived in for the last six, seven or eight years, it is an opportunity to come together in a vital economic space and say clearly that we understand that this is absolutely necessary if we are going to hand over to the next generation of Australians a country that has more opportunity not less. It is clearly a bipartisan recognition that these are the challenges that we have to overcome to achieve that. It is a friendly, perhaps—in many cases, competitive—tension, a contest of ideas, about how we can be best placed to address those challenges and ensure that our country becomes a global hub of innovation and entrepreneurship, because when our politicians come together as much as possible and in the most significant way possible to drive that economic change I am deeply optimistic about the future of this country. I feel proud of the fact that we can come into public life, we can contribute to the public debate and, in this space, we can hand over to the next generation of Australians a country with more opportunity not less.

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