Terri Butler (Griffith, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

Check the scoreboard, mate! I should not have called you 'mate'. You are not my mate; that is very clear. I should have called you 'minister'. My mates tend to be more interested in promoting the interests of start-ups and high-growth firms—people like the member for Chifley, who is my mate, and I am very pleased that he is.

Of course, the interesting thing about the policy is that we announced our policy to establish a new entity called Innovate Australia, based on the highly successful UK model, and then a very short time later the coalition decided to announce the same policy. So we support the creation of an entity that mirrors our policy. We are very pleased that the coalition reached out and had some bipartisanship on that aspect of our innovation policies, but we wish that they would adopt more of our policies that we took to the election in relation to innovation because ours were better and more comprehensive.

Specifically, what is happening here is a very piecemeal approach to innovation in this country. That is not good enough because there is a pressing imperative to diversify Australia's economy and early-stage, high-growth firms are an important part of that diversification. We would encourage the government to continue reading our policies that we announced before the election and to consider what other parts of our platform it might be interested in implementing so that we can work together to do that. In fact, if the government is looking for other inspiration, it could take a leaf out of the book of Minister Enoch in Queensland—a visionary minister in the Queensland Labor government led by Annastacia Palaszczuk. In her first term as a member of parliament, she became the innovation minister and went into bat for the importance of supporting innovation in Queensland and the diversification of our economy. The consequence of that is the incredibly successful advance of the Queensland program, which has been supported to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars. These things are so important because of that pressing need to diversify, because we need to know where the jobs of the future are going to come from and because high-growth firms are job creators.

I know that it can be scary. It can be worrying for a parent; I am a parent myself. My kids are six and four, and Troy and I often worry about the jobs that our kids will have access to in the future when they are a bit older. I know that it is very concerning for a parent to try to look into the future and guess what sorts of jobs are going to exist and what sorts of skills the kids are going to need in order to have those jobs. But that is a reason to be bolder, not more cautious. It is a reason to press ahead with reform, not retreat to the idea that we just close our eyes and hope that things might not change. That is not going to work. We have to embrace the opportunities that are going to be brought by the new and emerging economy. That includes the necessity of thinking about how innovation policy can support high-growth firms that can create jobs.

I said that the government could look for inspiration from the balance of our platform. Of course I wanted to mention the shadow minister, who is here with us tonight—the member for Chifley—but other leaders amongst the parliamentary Labor Party also put together a phenomenal platform to take to the election in relation to innovation. I could not possibly talk about all of it because we would be here for another five hours if I tried to do that. But I want to mention that that policy really aimed at looking at where the money is going to come from to invest in these early-stage firms, how are we going to make sure that people who have great ideas can pitch for the capital that is available and how are they going to be supported through the information that they need? Anyone who has ever started a business would know that you need lots of information and support. You need to know practical things such as: how do you employ people legally and how on earth do you deal with suppliers and the tax office?

There is a range of things that need to be done in that regard, and of course we need policies that will do other things. We need policies that will promote the right skills.

That is why I was so pleased to announce, with the member for Chifley and of course with the Leader of the Opposition in Sydney last year, a program to get girls into coding. We had Code Club there. They were doing a program at Sydney Town Hall, and there were so many young people, but particularly girls—teenage girls learning coding and learning computational thinking through physical objects. It was an amazing place to be and it was a fantastic program.

When I first came to this place and we were talking about coding being needed for primary schools, in 2014, the coalition government laughed at the idea that we would have coding in primary schools. I think they really just did not understand the imperative. And now whenever I go into schools and I see the digital literacy curriculum being rolled out and I see the support the Queensland government is giving to schools in my state that are doing that and I talk to teachers and I talk to principals and I talk to parents—there is such a big move on to make sure that computational thinking is being taught.

My portfolio responsibility is higher education, and I was lucky recently to visit the Queensland University of Technology's school holiday STEM camp to see kids from across almost 200 schools in Queensland, to actually be at these different projects happening at that camp. There is an amazing piece of work being done in relation to biomanufacturing where they are 3D modelling people's ears for kids who are born without one of their ears. A mould is created for that, and the kids were learning about 3D printing in a form of silicon so that kids can have a second ear. I was so fortunate to see those grade 11 kids actually getting hands-on experience of that really serious and fascinating research and biomanufacturing project, led by Associate Professor Mia Woodruff at the Queensland University of Technology.

So, getting those skills right is important, from early education through school through vocational education through universities, and I am so proud of the policies we took to the election in relation to those things from capital to supporting the start-up sector and having an Australia in which it is possible to see how people could benefit from these new and emerging businesses in the future. Just to give you an example, I was recently given the opportunity to go to Commerce Queensland—or, I should say, the CCIQ, nowadays; I am showing my age! They have a collaboration with BlueChilli. People would know about BlueChilli, which is a really significant and leading accelerator program. The founder of the program came and spoke to a Friends of Innovation event for us when we kicked it off. They have a really great collaboration—Collaborate—in Queensland. The member for Chifley and the shadow Treasurer and Pat O'Neill and I were very fortunate to go for a tour through Collaborate and then address the stakeholders who were involved in that.

When we were there we talked to a lot of the start-ups that were just starting up their businesses, getting ready, looking at how to be high-growth, and I met this amazing man. He has a vision that I think every member of this House could get behind: a vision to make beer a force for good—

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