Ed Husic (Chifley, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary to the Shadow Treasurer) Share this | Hansard source

The world's greatest minister, exactly. The nation did welcome that with a degree of 'wide-spread irony', I believe the term is—that was the way it was received. At any rate—

Mr Hunt interjecting—

No, you should go out. You should go and tell people. That is how you should introduce yourself, Minister: the world's greatest minister. 'I'm Greg Hunt. I'm the world's greatest minister.' Go and talk to people like that. I actually extend to you the invitation to do that.

The realisation is this: it is not in your heart to champion them. You are not out there championing them. You are not recognising the fact that the rate of start-up formation in this country, relative to other countries, is low and that we need to deal with it. If you think that the ecosystem will purely be sustained by focusing on established businesses and that they will drive innovation of themselves without dealing with the fact that start-ups and the early-stage innovation sector—the early green shoots of innovation in this country—are not being formed at the rate of elsewhere, it needs to get the focus now; otherwise, what happens is that we just import ideas. That is all we do—we import ideas and other processes instead of doing it ourselves.

That is the reality—that if you do not provide that focus to early-stage innovation and ensure that the capital and the talent is flowing into the sector, all that will happen is that we will see atrophy. We will be the first to come second. That is what will be happening—instead of being able to rely on our own skills to see the growth of start-ups in this country, the growth of those ideas and the embracing of these by SMEs and big businesses.

At this stage, there is absolutely no promise that this government will continue to champion it, certainly not under this minister, and there will be a continued inability to argue for the types of things that do need to change. These include the need to deal with the crippling shortages of skills that will help sustain those start-ups and get them ready for growth, and the need for the investment that is required to sustain those ideas and see their expansion. I noticed, for example, that the minister has announced the expansion of the accelerator program, which we had argued—

Mr Hunt interjecting—

It was not your idea, actually. Someone else had to think of it for you. It was an idea that was announced during the campaign as a result of the type of pressure that the federal opposition was putting on the government to increase the amount of investment that you had dedicated. The reality is that you only set aside $8 million for that accelerator support. It is now $25 million or $23 million. It was expanded because, when we were going around the nation, in regional Australia, and saying that we should be seeing start-up communities emerge beyond city boundaries and that we needed more support for that, such as working with the higher education sector, working with local chambers of commerce, working with others—

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