Jenny McAllister (NSW, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I move:

That the Senate take note of the answers given by ministers to questions without notice asked by Opposition senators today.

I will confine my remarks, primarily, to the contribution from Senator Brandis about the question of innovation. I think everyone here understands that we are in a period of transformation in the Australian economy. I hope that some people here reflect on the occasional naivety during the long period of the mining boom, where there were those who asserted that this boom would go on forever, that it would never end and that it should be the only thing that underpinned the Australian economy.

That was not the understanding of people on this side of the chamber, and in government we relentlessly pursued a process of establishing the architecture for an ongoing, sustainable, serious, transformative innovation investment that would leverage the abilities in the public sector and the private sector to achieve a great transformation for Australian business and Australian industry. We did that with the confidence that Australia possesses some of the great researchers globally. We possess some of the great research institutions. We possess great innovative and entrepreneurial people who are keen to participate in private enterprise and to use the achievements in the private sector to build an economy that all of us can be proud of and that all of us can benefit from.

It is disappointing to hear in the answers provided today that not a single element of Senator Brandis's answer related, in any way, to the issues that I have been speaking about. They did not really speak to innovation, structure, collaboration, universities and research institutions. Instead, they addressed questions like consumer confidence and the government's overweening confidence in the abilities of the Prime Minister. It is nice that they are confident, but I think that what we would like to see is some actual action in relation to these questions, because, in the Abbott-Turnbull government, there has been an enormous gap between the rhetoric that has been presented in recent weeks and the reality of their period in government.

They are the government that, in their 2014 and 2015 budgets, ripped out investment in science, research and innovation to the tune of $3 billion. Indeed, the Prime Minister, as the Minister for Communications, oversaw the demise of NICTA, a world-class research facility focused on information and communications. They voted for cuts to the R&D tax incentive. They backed the abolition of Commercialisation Australia, an entity which had supported 500 ventures that each raised $2 for every $1 invested by the government. They supported cuts to university research, to CSIRO and to ANSTO. They supported $107 million in cuts to the Cooperative Research Centres program. They are a government that are in no way interested in leveraging the power of the public sector to support the private sector in innovation, and it is a very great shame, because what we know is that when we see firms that undertake innovation it almost doubles the productivity of those firms.

We know that firms that collaborate with public sector research entities, with CSIRO or with a university are 2.5 times more likely to report an increase in their own productivity. We know that all of our international competitors—the people that we seek to emulate in building a spatially and sectorally diverse economy—invest themselves most significantly in public sector research, yet every action for this government has been about dismantling the comprehensive system of structures that we put in place in government to support activities of exactly this kind.

I want to say to people who are listening to this debate that, in government, Labor will place innovation at the centre of our approach. We will build on our record. We will build on an approach which sought to establish positive relationships and collaborative relationships between the private sector and the public sector. We will not be involved in a race to the bottom. We will not be involved in a naive reliance on commodities alone. We see a future for Australia that builds on all of our talents, and that is something that I am very proud to support.