Zoe McKenzie (Flinders, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to speak to the Higher Education Support Amendment (Australia's Economic Accelerator) Bill 2022, but before I get too into too much detail about the bill I would just like to correct the statements made by the former speaker, the member for Casey. It is true that this year—and this year alone, I expect—the seat of Casey will hold the record for the largest number of tradies. May I say I've been inundated with comments from my electorate suggesting that, if we included landscape gardeners and other trades, we would definitively be the winner. So enjoy it while you have it, Member for Casey. It will not last.

I am pleased to speak in support of this bill to deliver the Australia's Economic Accelerator program, which was indeed introduced by the previous coalition government in February of last year as part of their $2.2 billion University Research Commercialisation Action Plan. Our universities undertake incredibly important and high-quality work in research. As we have heard, the World Intellectual Property Organization's 2022 Global Innovation Index placed Australia fifth in the world for human capital and research. However, on the same Global Innovation Index, we ranked 37th for knowledge and technology outputs. This disparity means that, whilst Australia is proudly recognised as a research powerhouse, much of our early-stage research is frequently not progressed to later stages of development, because of the risk and uncertainty around commercial returns.

The Australia's Economic Accelerator program seeks to bridge this disparity, bringing our output of knowledge and technology in line with the expertise of our research. The AEA program will create a research ecosystem where our world-class research is translated into real-world innovations and productivity gains. This program will operate as a priority driven grant program to support projects aligned with national research priorities and with high commercial opportunity.

To that end, I do wish that the Albanese government maintained this desire to support national research priorities locally by not scrapping funding for projects such as the National Centre for Coasts and Climate at Point Nepean National Park in my electorate of Flinders. This would have been our only higher education footprint in the electorate of Flinders, bringing world-class researchers in coasts and climate to the Mornington Peninsula to undertake their work, in partnership with the University of Melbourne and Monash University. But I digress.

Funding will be available to universities and will require applicants to partner with industry. Grants of between $20,000 and $500,000 are available to fund eligible activity, with matched funding requirements determined on a case-by-case basis. Without government intervention, new innovations and technologies will continue to stall. But the coalition has a proud history in addressing this issue. In 2014, the coalition released the 'Boosting the commercial returns from research' discussion paper, as part of its Industry Innovation and Competitiveness Agenda. This paper cited insufficient knowledge transfer between researchers and business as a key driver of a lack of research commercialisation, arguing that addressing this issue would 'help drive innovation in Australia, grow successful Australian businesses, and boost productivity and Australia's exports, ensuring the competitiveness of the Australian economy into the future'. In 2015, the coalition commissioned the Watt review, which recommended actions similar to those recommended in the 'Boosting the commercial returns from research' paper. In December 2015 the $1.1 billion National Innovation and Science Agenda was launched. For universities, this agenda built on the BCRR paper and the Watt review and included changes to research funding arrangements for all universities.

During the unstable and unpredictable period of 2020 and 2021 due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the coalition maintained its focus on research collaboration and commercialisation, introducing a one-off increase to research support program funding. In February 2022 the former coalition government announced a university research commercialisation action plan. My dear friend and indeed the chair of the expert panel which provided input into the $5.8 million scoping project to accelerate university research translation, Mr Jeff Connolly, said that significant reforms were needed to improve Australia's commercialisation woes. At the time, Mr Connolly said:

It was very quickly apparent that a single program was not the solution to this issue and that a more strategic and systemic approach was required. The result is the broad-ranging reforms outlined in this Action Plan.

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This Action Plan commits the Australian Government to shifting the dial to place more emphasis on the translation and commercialisation of research.

That plan outlined key initiatives to reform Australia's research commercialisation landscape across four key areas: placing national manufacturing priorities at the core of Australian government funded research; priority-driven schemes to ramp up commercialisation activity; university research funding reform to strengthen incentives for genuine collaboration with industry; and investing in people who are skilled in university-industry collaboration.

The mechanisms to drive these reforms would be: $243 million over five years for the Trailblazer Universities Program to boost prioritised R&D and drive commercialisation outcomes with industry partners; $1.6 billion over 10 years for Australia's Economic Accelerator, a new stage-gated competitive funding program to help university projects bridge the so-called valley of death and the road to commercialisation; and a $150 million capital injection to expand the CSIRO Main Sequence Ventures program, which backs startup companies and helps create commercial opportunities from Australian research. There would be $296 million to be invested in 1,800 industry PhDs and over 800 in fellows over 10 years. And the creation of a new IP framework for universities would support greater university-industry collaboration and the uptake of research outputs.

This plan was widely supported at the time by stakeholders including the Business Council, Universities Australia, Group of Eight, the IRU, the ATN and Mining Australia. Ensuring that our university and higher education providers' research is better translated into commercial opportunities is critically important going forward, and I am pleased that this government is continuing the work of the previous government on this matter.

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