Ed Husic (Chifley, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for the Digital Economy) Share this | Hansard source

I want to highlight the growth of our digital economy and highlight its importance to the broader economy's future success. In particular, early-stage innovators and start-ups provide huge job-creating potential for our economy. They support other businesses, increasing the level of business activity and work that can be done by others, and they also deliver smarter, more innovative ways of working that improve other businesses too.

In the last few weeks, I've been concerned by the findings of three important reports. The first one was Startup muster, which is organised by Monica Wulff. She does a tremendous amount of work and congratulations to her. This is the fourth time the Startup muster report has been handed down, with over 2,000 participants.

A division having been called in the House of Representatives—

Sitting suspended from 10:59 to 11:18

If you are a believer in the need for the nation to become a smarter one for the long-term success of the economy and for jobs, you'll be concerned by three reports that came out in the last few weeks. The first is Startup muster.This is the fourth time the report's been done, and it had the biggest ever response rate. It is run by Mon Wulff and did a terrific job, but the report showed that there are big concerns around skills and the lack of talent that exists here and the fact that there's not enough capital to allow these firms to survive.

Those types of concerns are echoed by the release of the 2017 Crossroads report by StartupAus. Congratulations to Alex McCauley for that report, which also highlighted (1) that skills are a big issue for the sector; (2) that internet speeds are way behind where they should be; (3) that, on capital, they question the effects of the tax incentives, saying that angel investment had fallen 50 per cent since the last year, and (4) that their big concern was that there's been a drop-off of focus by the federal government on this space.

It's been two years since the government released the National Innovation and Science Agenda. We were told that this would be the first of many but, rather than being NISA 1.0, it looks like it's NISA one point only, and people are genuinely concerned about where things are going. These are the things that need to be addressed urgently by the government. First, they need to release information about how effective the angel investment tax arrangements have been and what the problem is in the take-up. Second, they need to get their act together on things like equity crowdfunding. They brought in a regime which we criticised earlier in the year because it was about a headline and not substance, and now, because they removed one week of parliamentary sittings, we haven't been able to get those reforms through when access to capital is a big issue. Third, they need to talk to the tech sector about the damaging changes that have been made to the 457 system, which are throttling the ability of start-ups and early-stage innovators to get talent. There is a lot of work to be done. We cannot afford a lack of focus. (Time expired)

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