Matthew Canavan (Queensland, Liberal National Party) Share this | Hansard source

I did want to speak this evening on the actual topic. I wanted to speak on science. I will still, hopefully, get to science, but Senator Bilyk spent just a bit under 20 minutes speaking about politics in a very misleading way. I think at the end she said Labor has a vision. She certainly had visions in that speech, because they were not actually based in fact at all! I want to point out a few of the mistruths in this and I might actually use some facts while I do that.

I picked up that Senator Bilyk said that there had been over $1 billion in cuts from R&D tax credits under this government. It surprised me a bit that she attributed those to this government, because they were actually announced by the previous government. Those cuts were their policy in government. To make sure that the Australian public know that I am not misleading the Senate, I actually have some facts here in front of me that Senator Bilyk did not have. I have a press release here from Mr Wayne Swan on 27 June 2013. He said:

The R&D Tax Incentive is one of the most important elements of the Government's support for our innovation system. It will continue to provide generous, easy-to-access support for around 10,000 companies each year who are undertaking eligible R&D.

This is the kicker:

The change will affect less than 20 corporate groups and will ensure this support is better targeted at small to medium businesses.

He was envisaging exactly what this government has done, which is focus the R&D tax credit on small and medium enterprises, not large companies. The press release went on to say:

Savings from the reforms - estimated at over $1 billion from 2014 to 2017 - will fund Government priorities including measures announced in the Government's Industry and Innovation Policy Statement, A Plan for Australian Jobs.

So Senator Bilyk has just spent a fair amount of time of her speech criticising Labor Party policy, which I am not objecting to. If that is how Senator Bilyk wants to use her time in this chamber, we should give her an extension of time. We should hear more from Senator Bilyk more often so that she can expose in more detail the deficiencies of Labor's approach to policymaking in this country.

I also heard Senator Bilyk say that CSIRO has had job losses, and it is a fact that CSIRO, unfortunately, has had job losses in the past few years. Again, what Senator Bilyk did not mention was that in fact, of the 1,000 reduction in staff numbers in CSIRO in the past few years, 600 of those actually occurred between 30 June 2013 and the end of 2014, almost completely during the Labor government except for those last few months of 2014.