The AFR has reported that Industry Minister Karen Andrews (whose responsibility includes oversight of the R&D Tax Incentive) recently met with representatives of high profile Australian start ups and parties from venture capital firms. Attendees at the meeting included personnel from Airtasker, who had a previously lodged R&D claim found to be ineligible by regulators, which had been previously highly publicised in the media. Ms Andrews was quoted within the article as: being concerned by the dropping level of business […]
This week, the Australian Financial Review (AFR) hosted its annual Innovation Summit involving presentations and discussions by technology sector and industry leaders. The importance of stability in innovation policy (and in particular, the R&D Tax Incentive) was a largely uniform view among those participating in the summit. Key notes from the presentations include the following: A representative from CSL noted that the timeline for commercialising drugs required thinking in 10-15 year cycles, and that frequent changes to innovation policy made […]
A recent report published from the Office of the Chief Economist has found that government assistance (such as that available from the R&D Tax Incentive) has a positive impact on a company’s ability to generate external finance. The report referenced previous papers investigating the effectiveness of R&D Tax Incentives which found substantial evidence that receiving R&D tax subsidies improve the likelihood and amount of external financing available to a firm, especially when the firm is small and high-tech (Lerner, 1999; Feldman […]
Following on from Prime Minister Scott Morrison’s calls for business to identify regulatory road blocks to investment, Industry Leaders have named proposed cuts to the R&D Tax Incentive as their key concern. An AFR article published today has reported that industry leaders consider reversing $4B in cuts over the estimate periods from the two preceding budgets as being the single most valuable lever available to the government to encourage business investment. The article had also noted industry lobby association StartupAUS’ […]