Andrew Laming (Bowman, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I will focus on the National Innovation and Science Agenda and how this year's budget has built on those initiatives. Obviously, there's fairly uniform support for a dynamic 21st century Australia. My colleague the deputy chair of the Standing Committee on Education, Employment and Training and I have done consecutive reports on whether Australia is well prepared in school, university and the employment sector itself to take advantage of our geographic position. We're basically in the same time zone as half of the world's middle class. The opportunities for Australia have never been greater as the geopolitics have moved into our neck of the woods. But, increasingly, we hear reports about school standards and reports about poor levels of collaboration between industry and the tertiary education sector, and these really threaten the obvious opportunities that lie ahead for Australia.

Because of the access to the global economy right now, people are concerned that Australians are not getting the education they need to move into work and that we're overly reliant on 457 visas and other solutions to meet those gaps. Both parties would have strong views about Australians being trained first for these highly skilled tasks. There's plenty of evidence around that says that the workforce is changing and everyone is going to be moving into higher tech jobs and that the jobs we all know of today won't exist in 20 years time. I'm not quite so bearish about that. I don't think we have to be so nihilistic as to think that jobs are going to vanish, but what will absolutely happen in the working careers of Australians leaving school now is that there will be not only way more stages in their career but a constant need to be able to adapt to the needs of innovation, tech, maths and STEM in whatever job they're doing. This is not just simply an argument, as the assistant minister would agree, about whether we can reshape TAFE, whether universities offer sufficient STEM emphasis or whether we can have enough workplace based learning so that universities have one foot in industry, but it's about having the agility in nearly every field of study to make sure we're ready for what's coming, be it automation or higher levels of STEM. There is going to have to be an extra arrow in the quiver, so to speak, to make sure that we're ready for those changes and that we can forecast them in advance.

Businesses, universities, research organisations, even CSIRO: the best in the world are fully capable of taking on these big questions, but we need to make sure that at a government level we're prepared to be an exemplar of it. Those areas that were identified back in late 2015, when the National Innovation and Science Agenda was formulated, are the areas that it's appropriate now, two or three years on, to be making sure that we're making progress in. We note already in Australia, as I referred to before, less connection between industry and tertiary education. There's some doubt about the quality of that data and whether areas like advertising and marketing are included or not overseas, as we do include them in Australian data. But, that set aside, we do know that in Australia there is a significant valley of death for early start-ups to move to a position where they have sufficient capital to take on the world. It's possibly the less risk-taking culture that we see in Australia that does remain a challenge for start-ups, even in our capital cities.

That investment of $1.1 billion back in late 2015, over four years, to incentivise innovation and entrepreneurship may not have been what everyone talked about at the water cooler, but we know it's the long-term decision that we have to get right if the next generation looks back and questions what we did to prepare for changes that were coming. Those four areas, culture and capital, embracing risk, incentivising, early stage investment in start-ups, convincing our massive SME sector to contemplate the possibility of partnering up with a university—actively asking the questions about how they can be helped by tertiary education and not just sitting there with folded arms expecting universities to go out and find every SME in the country and ask how they can help. It is about collaboration, particularly with the research sector, actively setting aside a component of their budget to make sure that they can operationalise and commercialise great research, and bringing together research that happens even within the same tertiary campuses.

Lastly, government is obviously an exemplar, leading by example and showing that we can manage data and transform data into useable information for the population. These are all objectives that I think are noble and would be supported on both sides. So my question to the assistant minister is: how has this year's budget continued to build on the government's National Innovation and Science Agenda?

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