I thank the member for Wentworth. A lot was covered off by her there, but I want to recognise that she's done a mighty lot of work in talking with people that we both know and have great regard for when it comes to building a stronger economy by thinking differently, coming up with new ideas and being able to convert those ideas into commercial practice. Again, I think these contributions are really important. If there's anything this parliament can do with more of, it is thinking about how we generate new enterprises and how to grow them and make them much more solid, particularly enterprises that are trying to change the nature of the economy.

The reality is our world faces three big issues in particular. We have the impact of global warming, the rise of artificial intelligence and the breakdown of the international rules based order that deals with those things. When it comes to global warming, for a country like ours that has been dependent on resources for so long and made so much money, particularly from fossil fuels, as the world starts pivoting away and we start seeing lower demand, what will happen is that we will earn less money off those things as a nation.

That requires us to think differently about how we make our income and about the jobs that we create, and it does require us to think really deeply about the economic complexity of the nation. We have too many eggs in a few baskets. The parliament, as I said before, needs to think about the types of firms that emerge, but the parliament also needs to think about the face, shape, operations and the economy not just in an election cycle but for many years ahead—dare I say, decades ahead.

On top of those three things that I mentioned, there will be things that come out of the blue, that are unexpected and that also challenge and pressure economies. We lived through it. A once-in-a-generation pandemic really highlighted for this nation how dependent we were on just one country for all our goods and services. We recognised that we were vulnerable to dysfunctional supply chains. We realised that so much of the stuff we took for granted required importation. The things we needed the most weren't there when we needed them most, and we said, particularly as an incoming government, that we would reimagine what we do so that we can ensure that, on those key things—those national priorities and the goods that are really important to us—we'll able to do a lot more of that work ourselves.

These things are very big. They're big, hairy problems that are very difficult to solve. To do that, we need ideas. We need people to think differently about how to solve those problems. For instance, if we want to reimagine how we reduce our dependency on overseas supply chains and how we make more of our own goods, how we do so, when others have perfected the production process and we haven't got that ourselves, requires smart people—researchers and scientists—to start thinking of the ways to get this done. It also requires entrepreneurs to join with that effort to convert an idea from a lab benchtop into a production process and turn that into a commercial reality. We need a lot of people to do it.

In any nation, the key to all that I'm describing is having a healthy base of research and development. In Australia, we often celebrate really smart people who have done incredible things. We are, for example, right on the cusp of curing one of the most terrible conditions that has affected women: cervical cancer. We are now immunising young women from cervical cancer using Gardasil. Gardasil was created—it came out of an Australian mind in Dr Ian Frazer, and we owe him a big healthy dose of gratitude for what he's done to transform the lives of women and prevent them dying early from cervical cancer. It was an Australian who did it, but it was an overseas company that made the products and took all the gains.

We see this time and again, and I am so frustrated that an idea that began in an Australian mind is finished with hands on another side of the planet. We can do this work, and we can make it happen here, but R&D is critical as part of that process. In this country, as much as we have some really great minds, we've got a really bad way of supporting those great minds. If you look at R&D investment, it fell from 2.24 per cent of gross domestic product to 1.69 per cent in just 15 years.

In the OECD, we performed terribly on R&D. We have got to do better, but it's not an easy thing to fix. In the last term, as an industry minister, I pushed a number of times. It may come as a big surprise, but I can be a bit persistent! I did continue to badger my way into making sure we got a review of R&D in this country, and it ended up being called the Strategic Examination of Research and Development. It was designed to maximise the value of public investment in research. It was looking at harnessing and growing business investment in R&D. It looked to leverage our scientific strength to help address national priorities and, importantly, to foster new industries.

This is really important. As I said earlier, we have too many eggs in one basket. Our economy is not complex enough. We need to come up with new industries that make money. I'll give you an example. We can do this. People in this chamber would probably be unaware that we export a product that earns more money than some agricultural products that we currently ship overseas. There'd be very few people in this place that would think that software licensing is creating a lot of export dollars for us, but it's actually doing much better than most agricultural products in this country. Australians are coming up with software that is being bought by other people overseas, but that takes a lot of work, and we can't just have a few of those examples. But we are creating those new sectors in this country.

The SERD, as it became known, was headed up by Robyn Denholm, a terrific Australian, who is now chair of Tesla internationally. She came from the western suburbs of Sydney, made her way through different jobs and has been recognised for great business acumen, particularly in a company that has had to rely heavily on R&D, to change the way we drive cars and produce them. We had Professor Ian Chubb, former chief scientist, on there. We had Fiona Wood from WA, who was the instrumental person in the development of spray-on skin, which was critical when we had victims of the Bali bombing who had suffered terrible burns. She was able to help them repair their skin. We put her on the SERD panel. Someone who I've got great admiration for is Kate Cornick, who headed up LaunchVic and has been involved in helping start-ups in Victoria for many, many years. A great mind, she is now involved as the CEO of the Tech Council of Australia.

I want to formally, on the record, thank those people for their work. Their work has been absolutely critical in outlining how we can improve the way in which we invest in R&D in this country. To be completely frank, I would much prefer a much more developed and detailed response to SERD than a sporadic attempt to deal with some of those things. The review has been mentioned a number of times in terms of underpinning the changes that are being debated in this amendment today, but we do need to have a much more comprehensive response. I imagine the panel is keen to do it, and they've done a mighty job for this nation with the work that they've done, but it is critical work to think about how we invest more in this process.

The government has done a lot here to try and think this through. I know that there's been a focus on core R&D. Core R&D is important, but so is the supporting effort as well, particularly if you're developing hardware. Hardware does require the translation of a concept in the core phase, where you think of an idea, you think it might work, but when you go from a prototype you realise it may not actually stack up commercially and no-one will buy the product in the way that it's being put forward. Supporting R&D takes the time to do that. It's why, for example, the idea of capping—how long it takes or how long you can claim the R&DTI—has had such resistance, particularly in areas of biotech. But I also think of people in the climate tech space who are helping us reduce emissions with new hardware. It takes them ages to get that sorted, so we do need to see a bit of flexibility around that.

There are a lot of changes in here. I know there are people in the startup sector who've reached out to me who are happy with the level of engagement that the Treasurer and Treasury have undertaken, but they still have some concerns. Obviously, we are trying to work through some of that moving forward.

But I do get tired, I have to say; it took me a while to get the SERD up. When it comes to R&D, it's not the first time that there have been moves to change it. Under the former government, there was a move to cut $2.4 billion out of R&D—and before then, when we were last in government, there was a move to change the capital gains tax arrangements on employee share ownership, which, frankly, was disastrous. We get the advice from the same two departments. It doesn't matter, as I keep saying, who is on this side of the House; we get advised by the same people—the hive mind that is built between the Department of the Treasury and the Department of Finance—that do not look at Australian R&D as an investment. They see it as a cost and they see it as a way to cut, and they always put forward these types of ideas to cut costs. We can't afford that in this country. Treasury in particular have made public statements where they believe that it's better for us to just adapt someone else's technology than to develop here in this country. This is selling out our country terribly—absolutely awful.

We need those people who are stuck in ideological permafrost to recognise that, if we want to get the economy ready for the long-term, if we want to learn the lessons of the pandemic, if we want to ensure that not all our eggs are in one basket, if we want to not be dependent on vulnerable supply chains, we need to back R&D. But if we listen to Treasury and we listen to Finance, they're always going to be looking for a quick save—and we can't have it, because they don't have faith in Australian innovation. Like I said, when we were last in office it was they that suggested we tax unrealised gains in employee share ownership—terrible for start-ups, and we backed the last government in fixing it. The last government had a revolt in its own ranks about changes to R&D that were pushed, and I have to congratulate Senator Hume in leading that charge in government to convince the Morrison government not to go ahead with massive cuts to R&D. But now we've had to deal with proposals yet again by Treasury and Finance that we make these changes to R&D—terrible.

If we want the country to be stronger longer term, on its own two feet, in a changing world, we need to not only back our scientists and researchers; we absolutely have to back those start-ups, those early-stage companies, to make sure that they can succeed in the best possible way. There are a lot of good changes in here, and I'm glad that a lot of work's been done, but we can absolutely do better into the future. The parliament needs to take the time to learn a lot more about the work of start-ups and the contribution they make to this great nation of ours.