Michelle Ananda-Rajah (Higgins, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

Innovation is absolutely central to our economic progress and our global competitiveness as a country. There is no dispute about that. But innovation is driven by innovators. So let's meet some innovators. I'm someone who has come from an academic background. I was an associate professor at a university and I led a medtech entity at one of those universities, so I do know something about innovation.

Let's meet some of those innovators. Sebastian is four years following his post doc, his PhD, and he's focused on developing a battery that does not rely on critical minerals. Sebastian has just learned that his professor has been denied funding after five attempts at writing a grant, and this means that the professor is going to have to lay off staff, including Sebastian. As I speak to Sebastian, he's googling job opportunities in the United States. Then we meet a woman with two children. Let's call her Michelle. Michelle did a PhD. She won lots of awards and then, once her children came, she really, really struggled to get back into that research pipeline. This was despite writing numerous grants in the middle of the night, on weekends and after hours. Each grant would take one month to write. She would hope that the reviewer looking at those grants would understand that being a working mother is not easy in the research space. Then, of course, we have Jim and Bruce, two entrepreneurs who have successfully got a startup, which has a proven, working prototype in wave energy. They've been given some funding by the government to take them to the next stage. However, they're now staring down the valley of death because business and venture capital investment in Australia has been declining and they just can't find takers. This is what it is like currently in Australia.

The coalition would have us believe that they have the answers: a new program with lots of money—throwing around the words 'accelerator', 'trailblazer', 'pioneer' or whatever you want to call it. The reality is that the coalition abandoned universities in their moment of need in the first couple of years of this pandemic. How much money did universities get from JobKeeper? They got nothing. As a result, we saw the departure of 41,000 jobs from the sector. Those job losses disproportionately affected women. Sixty-one per cent of those job losses affected women in a sector which already has very low representation of women academics. Less than one-third of the academic workforce in universities in STEM is women. Women comprise 13 per cent of employees in STEM related occupations in Australia. If we look at the metrics coming out soon, I'm sure that it will be lower as a result of this action. Despite not funding universities, the coalition still found $291 million to provide to a casino—we all know which casino that was—so there was no money for universities but plenty of money for gambling.

We then saw the coalition wave away the international students. They actually said to them, 'Go home.' That's what the former Prime Minister said: 'Go home.' Not only was that callous, it also sounded a little bit racist, to be honest, and it was an absolute violation of the values of common decency and care that we as Australians hold dear. The Global Innovation Index, which is a benchmark international ranking system, has shown that Australia ranks 25th out of 132 countries. Under the coalition, we have dropped another six spots—five under the Morrison government. Business investment in Australia has been declining, and that has really fallen in parallel with the decline of our manufacturing sector. And, in terms of our ranking in the OECD for business collaboration with industry, you can see that we are actually right there—right at the bottom.

See this speech in context