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Labor Announcement on R&D Tax Policy

During this week’s election campaign announcements, Labor party industry spokesmen Kim Carr has outlined the following in discussions with the AFR and Innovationaus.com:

•  Labor want to increase Australia’s Business Expenditure on R&D to 3% of GDP by 2030. As part of this, they would seek to double the number of companies registered for the R&D Tax Incentive;
•  Labour would offer a “collaboration premium” that would add 10% to the value of a company’s R&D Offset for certain qualifying expenditure such as:

Expenditure in cooperating with a university or the CSIRO as part of an eligible project; or

Embedding industry researchers within a university facility, employing recent PhD graduates in their first three years of employment, or hiring PhD students to do industrial research;

• Labor have indicated they would conduct a review of how the programme was being administered to balance between integrity of the programme and the treatment of participants;

Swanson Reed encourages all sides of politics to commit to preservation of a stable R&D Tax Incentive, and we seek to work alongside the programme administrators to maintain the compliance integrity and equitable treatment of companies accessing the programme.