Ed Husic (Chifley, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Industry and Innovation) Share this | Hansard source

At the outset, I want to flag that Labor is not going to oppose the Industry Research and Development Amendment (Industry Innovation and Science Australia) Bill 2021, because this bill is a do-nothing bill. There would be as much value in opposing this bill as maybe opposing it on the grounds that we didn't like the font.

This bill does one thing only: it puts one word into the existing title of a government agency or body. It was called Innovation and Science Australia and now it will be called—ta-dah!—Industry Innovation and Science Australia. That's the big reform! The most substantive reform on innovation that's being put forward by this government is a name change. It's marketing—who would have guessed that the big push in innovation by a government led by a marketer is to do a name change? It's a brand change—a brand refresh, as those advertisers like to refer to it—and that's it.

This is laughable for any of the speakers who will speak on the bill after this. Bear in mind that in this session of parliament, which we started in February and are finishing today, the most substantive bit of legislation on innovation—the biggest thing that they've done on innovation, an activity that's required desperately so that we can rethink and re-conceive the operation of the economy in this country post pandemic—is this bill to change one word in in the name of an existing body. It's laughable! What will happen is that every government speaker on this one bit of legislation is going to go on about the importance of innovation, its value to the economy, the way they support manufacturing and all the things they do, and this bill does nothing about that—not a jot! Nothing in this bill advances that agenda, maybe other than that a printer will get a bit more money out of the government to reprint letterhead and some business cards, and a web designer will redo the website. That's all they're getting!

Let me make this clear: in making these criticisms, I'm not criticising the people who are involved in ISA. The people who are involved now, or in the past, are great contributors in advancing the innovation agenda in this country. They've done a lot of good work in times past and nothing of what I say in relation to this bill in any way, shape, form, word or anything should be seen as a reflection on their contribution. In fact, we celebrate what they've done and we champion too their ability to contribute—some of the people who are there or have been there. There was Atlassian's Scott Farquhar for one. I've said to him previously that we're very grateful for the consideration and thought that's been given to the work they produce, amongst a range of other activities which are done by ISA or, after this bill goes through, IISA.

That's not my criticism; my criticism is that the government are absent from a serious agenda for innovation. They have no clear objectives about what innovation will do, what they're doing in terms of innovation and how that will help to work with the business sector, education partners and others to advance innovation in this country. There's no broad game plan on how to advance innovation in this country through this government. All we have is advertising and marketing; we have nothing substantive underneath that. Exhibit A in the prosecution of that case is the bill itself. Again, like everything the government does, this bill is light on policy but very heavy on spin.

Apart from renaming the bill, there will be some consequential amendments to other government legislation. But all those amendments are doing is recognising the fact that the name has been changed—changes have to be made to other legislation to reflect the name change. This won't advance the interests of industry, it won't increase innovation and it won't prioritise scientific research in this country. Instead of substantive investment in Australia—in our ideas and in our innovation—the government creates cheap slogans and cosmetic spin. On the government's watch, what this spin cannot avoid us realising is that Australia has fallen three places to No. 23 on the Global Innovation Index. For example, their existing Entrepreneur Program has achieved little more than funnelling millions of dollars to multinational consulting firms.

Australia is home to many incredible companies and firms, but our innovative ideas languish with one of the lowest startup formation rates in the world. We've got to be more ambitious. We've got to commit ourselves to bring more great Australian ideas to the global market. At this point in time we have a Prime Minister whose big argument, when reflecting on, for example, the digital and tech innovation space, was that the country should adapt and embrace other people's ideas quicker, that this is the way that we will work better, faster and in much more efficient ways. Well, I would actually argue, and I think that a lot of people in the Australian innovation space would argue, that Australian ideas should be able to be championed on Australian soil and then projected into the international marketplace to make a difference elsewhere. The Prime Minister's great ambition is that we are the best consumers in an app store, rather than having the ideas on that app store that're taken up by others. That is probably the worst indictment of this government, that they think we will just be takers of other people's ideas, not makers of great ideas and see that develop in many other ways. We do need that to happen. We do need to see a lot more of the conversion of the ideas into reality.

We've had 60 or so reports on commercialisation that've languished. We had two more done by this government, and by different ministers—they weren't even talking to each other—on commercialisation. We had an industry minister do one report and an education minister do another. They were totally doing their own thing without even collaborating to ensure that we could deal with a long-running problem in innovation in this country. When you look on the Global Innovation Index pretty much every report says we have a lot of great people. The human capital element is very strong in this country. The conversion of the ideas into the concrete, commercialising them, is core. What we don't need is more reports. What we need is action. We don't need name changes. We don't need reports. We actually need to see changes in what's happening.

On some of the stuff that is working in this government's favour they don't want to support it. They had a report, for instance, that they commissioned into their own Industry Growth Centres that are thinking a lot about how to apply innovation within an industry context and deal with some of these issues. They won't release the report. We, as an opposition, have been calling for the government to release a report that says good things about their own initiative. That's an innovation in itself—that the opposition would be calling on the government to release a report that reflects well on themselves. They won't do it. Why? Because it runs counter to their ambition, or should I say their game plan, for those growth centres. They want to kill those growth centres off.

For example, the Advanced Manufacturing Growth Centre is supporting innovation in important areas like hydrogen storage systems, smart factory advancements, robotics, lithium battery development and production. They've been responsible for funding important advancements in COVID-19 testing—an area where the government's failed astoundingly—but the government doesn't want to fund them. Why? Because this is a government that wants to take money out of a successful program where the decisions get made by industry and they want to put it into their own grants program. In this case, the Modern Manufacturing Strategy that has got $1.5 billion that has been put there. The government wants the department—by that, remember when it's the department it's the minister. It's not the government or the bureaucracy; it's a political aspiration to ensure that money is diverted in the way they think works for their political advancement, not industry and national advancement. This is what's going on. They defund existing successful programs. They don't release the reports that say they're successful programs. They defund them. They pick up the money. They put it into a grant program so they can then spend in a way that they think works for their political interest.

For anyone who thinks I might be slightly cynical on this point, let's just go through the roll call: sports rorts, road rorts, regional funding rorts. We've had the way in which land has been disposed of—being sold to political donors. We've seen all this stuff happen continually.

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