Teresa Gambaro (Brisbane, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

My constituency question is to the Minister for Industry, Innovation and Science. Craig Deveson, CEO of Cloud Manager, has been a tireless advocate of innovation, working in the Brisbane technology start-up industry for many years. His business is just one of the many that have received a $500,000 grant as part of the government's Accelerating Commercialisation program. How do targeted programs like this benefit businesses like Cloud Manager in my electorate and in the broader community?

Christopher Pyne (Sturt, Liberal Party, Leader of the House) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I thank the member for Brisbane for her question about Cloud Manager. I know that she is a great advocate for the innovation agenda that the government is promoting in Australia because of the impact it will have on jobs and growth in Australia. She refers in her question to an excellent program which is part of the Entrepreneurs' Program, started by this government—$100 million a year over the forward estimates, so $400 million or thereabouts.

Cloud Manager is a business that has brought together a number of different kinds of online services that another business can access in the one place rather than having to find them all separately themselves. It increases profit and it saves them money and time. It is a very successful service. So the government is going to try to accelerate that particular innovative business through the Entrepreneurs' Program. I am not surprised at all that the member for Brisbane wants to talk about that because she has been a great advocate for that program, as she is for taking really good ideas in Brisbane and adding to them, using taxpayer support to create more jobs and more growth in areas where we know there will be success for the local economy. This, of course, is part of a wider picture.

The government will spend $9.7 billion in 2015-16 on research and development across all of the government departments. That is all being used to create jobs and growth, new ideas, inventions and research—it might be medical research or the CSRIO—to improve our lives, to add wealth to our economy, to get people out of unemployment and in to employment. I am very pleased to be part of the innovation team with the assistant ministers for science and innovation and, in the wider sense, the Minister for Communications and, of course, the Prime Minister, who is the No. 1 enthusiast for innovation, research and development and creating jobs using government support where that is a reliable thing to do.

Also, we will soon have a national innovation and science agenda. That is to be released before Christmas. That will be not only about what government can do but about freeing up what people can do with their own initiative through changes to the tax system that will encourage innovation, that will enable risk, that will help with the commercialisation of research, which will improve the skills and talents available to the economy in this area. As we are the biggest business in the economy with an enormous budget, we can use that procurement process to drive, as an exemplar, the whole economy around the innovation agenda. So I am very pleased to be part of that and I know the member for Brisbane will be back again talking about the great work in her electorate of Brisbane, as Cloud Manager has been proving.