2GB Ross Greenwood

E&OE TRANSCRIPT
Interview - 2GB Radio with Ross Greenwood
Monday 7 December 2015

SUBJECT: National Innovation and Science Agenda.

Ross Greenwood: But anyway, on that subject, let’s go to the Minister for Industry, Innovation and Science, Christopher Pyne, who is front and centre as a result of this new initiative from the Turnbull Government. And Christopher, we appreciate your time on the program.

Christopher Pyne: Ross, it’s good to be with you again.

Ross Greenwood: Look, here’s the interesting thing. This particular policy today that the Government’s coming out with, you need something else to start growing in Australia. You need fewer of our great scientific breakthroughs – including, say, Wi-Fi that the CSIRO invented itself – to disappear overseas and have the many billions of dollars that come from that innovation end up in many other parts of the world, and not in Australia, and not in the Australian Government’s coffers.

Christopher Pyne: Well, absolutely right. Now, one of the great things about today’s Innovation and Science Agenda is that we’re allowing the CSIRO to keep the profits from their Wi-Fi inventions to create a new CSIRO Innovation Fund, which we’re going to augment with more money and then have private investors partner with us to turn CSIRO and other national institutes great ideas into commercialized businesses that create revenue. As you said, we are post the resources boom. We’ll always have agriculture and resources and tourism and education services and financial services but Malcolm Turnbull wants to turbo charge the innovation and science part of the economy that will drive the jobs of the future, making us competitive with countries like Israel, United States, Germany, Japan, South Korea – it’s a very exciting development.

Ross Greenwood: Yeah, okay. You’re a former education minister as well, now the Minister for Industry, Innovation and Science. Is this an acknowledgement that Australia is wasting its science, is wasting its education system where clearly we have you know, if you like, a very highly educated workforce but maybe somewhere along the lines the ability to be able to commercialize the ideas really has been lost in Australia?

Christopher Pyne: Well, we have been but we’re not going to in the future. We’ve had some great examples of wonderful commercialization of science and we’ve won 15 Nobel Prizes so we have all the foundations. We have the sixth highest quality research in the OECD but we are the lowest, Ross, out of 33 OECD countries in the commercialization of research. And today’s announcement is going to do something about that.

Ross Greenwood: Well, see if we can do the pop quiz here with the people out here. You and I can do this between the two of us. Name a globally recognized brand in Australia.

Christopher Pyne: Cochlear.

Ross Greenwood: Cochlear, one – what else?

Christopher Pyne: Well, Wi-Fi.

Ross Greenwood: Wi-Fi, two, but really it’s not Australian anymore because we sold it out, didn’t we really?

Christopher Pyne: The Hills Hoist.

Ross Greenwood: The Hills Hoist goes back a fair way doesn’t it – do you reckon that’s new technology?

Christopher Pyne: The photocopier.

Ross Greenwood: The photocopier. But you know what I’m saying? It’s one of those things. I’ll go Penfolds …

Christopher Pyne: …I mean, there’s lots of others by the way. There are lots of pharmaceutical things, of course, and medical things.

Ross Greenwood: … CSL is another isn’t it out there.

Christopher Pyne: Yeah.

Ross Greenwood: Okay. So but the point is, what I’m saying, is that there’s not enough - for a country of our size, of our education, of our expertise - there are not enough that we’ve been able to hold here. Atlassian has to go to the United States to commercialize itself, as do many other young Australian scientists who simply give up the ghost here in Australia and go and find themselves a willing set of arms to put them around them and tell them that they’ll pay them well and look after them overseas.

Christopher Pyne: And the announcement today will change that into the future. We’re going to change the structure around start-ups and innovative start-ups to give them more support in terms of the Tax Act and the Corporate Law Act. We’re going to establish two new funds: the CSIRO Innovation Fund, which we’ve talked about but also the Biomedical Translation Fund, which will take the good research from the Medical Research Future Fund and it turn into commercialized outcomes that are creating jobs and growth. We’re going to change the visa system and put more money into science, technology, engineering and maths to train our teachers and our students so that they have the skills necessary around machine language and coding. International collaboration …

Ross Greenwood: I’ll pull you up here, Christopher because that’s one thing I think a lot of people will miss in this statement today: the ability to have young people in school learning computer coding, which is absolutely vital to the future of many of these breakthroughs that are going to come in the digital age. Now the truth is that this is where if you’re going to teach a kid, I don’t know, Chinese or French or Italian or something, you’d want to teach them coding as one of your basic second languages.

Christopher Pyne: And we’re going to invest $80-odd million in doing just that: inspiring students and teachers and women. In fact, I think it’s closer to $100 million if you include the projects around inspiring women into STEM science, technology, engineering and maths subjects. But also coding to give year fives and year sevens access to coding as part of their digital technologies curriculum; training the teachers around how to teach the digital technologies curriculum, which as the Minister for Education I made one of the national subjects. So all these things are very exciting because they work together and the stakeholders have been tremendously positive about the outcomes today because they see that it’s much more comprehensive than even they had anticipated.

Ross Greenwood: Yeah, okay, let’s now also go to the other unheralded part of this that a lot of people will be perhaps slow to pick up on and that is changes to insolvency laws. So reducing the default bankruptcy period from three years to one year …

Christopher Pyne: Yes.

Ross Greenwood: … and also a safe haven- safe harbour for directors from personal liability from insolvent trading if they appoint a professional restructuring advisor. Now, putting all that aside, it means that the stigma of failure does disappear but what you’ve got to be careful about is shonks don’t take advantage of this and simply set up a whole lot of phoenix companies that they can simply, you know, collapse companies and then turn up a year later and start doing the same thing.

Christopher Pyne: And that’s why we’re going to implement the same protections that exist now, so that a court or a trustee can apply to have a longer bankruptcy period if they suspect that the business is not being entirely honest. But what we are trying to do is say that if you fail at a business there should not be a sentence that completely blackens your character for the rest of your business career. That we want you to move on to your second business, you third business, your fourth business, and create jobs and create growth. We’ll still have the protections in place that are necessary but if you are trading insolvently we will allow you to have a grace period where you have a restructuring advisor to help you trade out of difficulty. We’re going to end the process where at the moment the shutters are pulled down on a business the instant that the creditors smell that there is danger in the business. So we’re going to allow time. We’re going to end the ipso facto contractor member clauses that are currently exist so that a contractor can instantaneously shut down a business as soon as they here that they’re having financial difficulties, as long as they have a restricting advisor and a plan to get out of those difficulties. Now, if they don’t, they’ll still suffer the same consequences that any other business would suffer. But if they do have a structure- restructuring plan, why wouldn’t want them trade out difficulty?

Ross Greenwood: Yeah, it’s absolutely true, and I’ll tell you the other thing as well is that this is all about the science and trying to commercialize the science. One of the foremost people in Australia I think is the Chief Executive of the CSIRO or the CSIRO as it’s now being dubbed. Larry Marshall is been doing this for many years in the United States; now back here running this organization Australia. He’ll be here on the program a little later. And also we’ve got the President of the Australian Computer Society …

Christopher Pyne: Yeah.

Ross Greenwood:… that’s Brenda Aynsley, she’s going to talk about teaching young kids all about coding. That’ll come up in the program but in the meantime, Christopher Pyne, the Minister for Industry, Innovation and Science; we appreciate your time here on Money News.

Christopher Pyne: Thank you Ross as ever.

[Ends]