Innovation Statement

And to add to the commentary, our gubment has just released their ‘innovation’ statement.

It’s another example of the wrong starting point.

Trying to create innovation is very easy but attempting to boost high tech exports from their current 1.5% of all exports is bloody hard and they have ‘wisely’ ignored the subject in their report.

To be clear, just about anything can be labeled as innovation, e.g. changing the font on Telstra’s logo, hiring a new Chief Scientist or releasing a report on innovation.

In any case here’s the major initiatives in the innovation statement:

1. Give more money to CSIRO! Eek, CSIRO should be wound up and given to the universities. No matter where you’re going you wouldn’t start from where CSIRO is today.

2. Helping startups by softening ‘trading insolvent’ rules (which are ignored anyway) and letting crowd funding get up – a bad idea because everyone will lose money and there will be a big backlash.

3. Some more cash for science research in universities which is not needed in this IT century.

4. Changes to university grant funding processes which will actually hurt universities and their export earnings. Basically the government has failed to recognise that universities and businesses don’t interact because Australian business are mostly in the services sector and use off-the-shelf technology platforms from foreign vendors. The universities are their OWN business and they are our third largest exporter; the grant schemes need to be designed to get them up the global uni rankings so they can charge their foreign students even more.

5. A marketing budget for STEM education that ignores the fact that we already training about 5x too many SEM graduates and not enough T graduates.

6. An entrepreneur’s incoming visa scheme to help boost the taxi driver ranks.

7. A cyber security growth centre designed to hand over our private data to commercial entities.

8. Landing pads for Australian startups in foreign places like Silicon Valley and Tel Aviv. This is white collar welfare for the operators. And who in their right mind would take a start up to Israel?

9. Tax offsets and relief from capital gains tax for investments in start ups. This is guaranteed to bring the white shoe brigade back into the scene to ensure the whole thing goes belly up in a few years when the rorts are outed by the ATO.