Australia’s government has announced a A$1.1b (£530m, $801m) innovation plan to replace the faltering mining boom with an “ideas boom”.
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And, to help startups, early-stage investors will receive a 20% non-refundable tax offset based on the amount of their investment as well as a capital gains tax exemption.
The default bankruptcy period will be reduced from three years to one while a safe harbour will protect directors from personal liability for insolvent trading if they appoint a professional restructuring adviser to develop a plan to turnaround a company in financial difficulty.
He has cited the example of Israel, the hi-tech powerhouse Australia wants to emulate, where a low proportion of research and innovation investment comes from the government.
Australian businesses will be encouraged to fail, and learn from that failure, with changes to insolvency laws.
The need to encourage risk taking and to accept that some failures are an inevitable part of an innovative culture are core to the statement’s approach.
Guardian Australia understands the plan will foreshadow changes to government procurement of IT services, in a bid to break down some of the barriers preventing small, startup businesses from competing for commonwealth contracts.
Aussie start-ups will be given incentives to kickstart their businesses.
This will include a series of “challenges” with winners receiving grants of up to $100,000 to test the ideas and then access to a further $1 million in funding.
“This is in addition to ongoing agricultural research undertaken by other government-funded agencies, including Cooperative Research Centres and the CSIRO, and our universities”.
“The government of the day’s decision in 2008 to restrict tax breaks on employee share schemes resulted in a brain drain from Australia and set the industry back years”.
“Unlike a mining boom, it is a boom that can continue forever and it is limited only by our imagination”, he said.
And the development of silicon quantum computing technology in Australia will be boosted by $26 million over five years, to be handed to the Centre for Quantum Computation and Communications Technology (CQC2T).
Turnbull announced a A$200 million innovation fund to support startups and to be run by the government-backed Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation, whose funding Abbott tried to cut drastically in his first budget in 2013.
The government will be supporting accelerators and incubators with $8 million in funding as part of an expansion of the Entrepreneurs Programme.
An additional $85 million will be spent on “talent and skills”, including on improving the “digital literacy” of school students.
Around $13 million over five years will go towards luring more women into STEM, by expanding the Science in Australia Gender Equity pilot; establishing a new “Champions of Change” initiative to focus on STEM; and partnering with the private sector to celebrate STEM female role models.
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Turnbull said there would be no cap placed on the number of new entrepreneur visas created to attract innovative talent, while changes would also be made to retain high achieving foreign students.
