Arthur Sinodinos (NSW, Liberal Party, Cabinet Secretary) Share this | Hansard source

Thank you to Senator Reynolds for this question, and I recognise her passion for all things to do with innovation. She, I think, with Senator Dio Wang cohosted today an important function with the chief scientist of Israel.

You are right: the government is committed to showing economic leadership that will create the jobs and growth that are necessary to provide wealth in our economy and jobs for Australians. We are doing this through a number of measures to drive economic leadership in this country. Most recently we passed the China-Australia Free Trade Agreement as well as the Korea and Japan free trade agreements and have reached agreement on the Trans-Pacific Partnership.

The government has introduced or reformed a range of programs that specifically support development and commercialisation of innovative goods and services. As the Prime Minister has said, we have to work more agilely, more innovatively. We have to become more nimble in the way we seize opportunities that are presented to us: the $255 million Industry Growth Centres program, which takes a sector based approach, to drive innovation by concentrating our investment on key sectors with strong growth potential; the Cooperative Research Centre program, which has $584 million in funding this year—the CRC program, which was an initiative of Labor many moons ago when Labor used to have ideas—will give considerable support to the growth centres and supports industry-led collaboration between researchers, business and the community; the R&D tax incentive, which is the government's single-largest investment in business innovation, a targeted, generous and market driven program to help businesses offset some of the costs of research; and the $482 million Entrepreneurs' Program, our flagship firm level initiative, which directly assists Australian businesses to take advantage— (Time expired)