James Riley

Startup founders and their venture capital partners will be relieved that the Treasurer has opened the door to carve-outs from his controversial capital gains tax discount changes. But Jim Chalmers’ fifth federal budget will have done nothing to ease the anxiety of the institutional research community, as recommendations of the Robyn Denholm-led Strategic Review of R&D have been left largely untouched. There are always winners and losers on Budget night, and while tech startups will have cause for optimism, the research community faces continued uncertainty. Industry grant programs have been slashed – including $800 million from Australia’s Economic Accelerator program – without being replaced. And while the budget outlined the creation of a National Resilience and Science Council to oversee the coordination of the cross-portfolio R&D system, the council is understood to be getting an advisory role only with no ability to direct funding decisions.

Treasurer Jim Chalmers says he wants to work with the startup sector to address concerns about changes to the Capital Gains Tax discount. But that doesn’t mean he’s going to walk away from the principles that underpin those changes. The policy argument still has a long way to run, and the government clearly feels it has got a good balance in its overall tax package, which it says will improve the efficiency of investment decisions and direct more money to productive investments. There were a bunch of different tax measures in the budget that are broadly revenue neutral. The biggest beneficiaries are small, innovative businesses. The changes have largely targeted these companies.

Good news has finally emerged from PsiQuantum’s Australian bunker with the company announcing it has ditched plans to build its world-first quantum computer at Brisbane Airport in favour of a site to the north, within the Moreton Bay council area. The company, which as recently as three months ago had insisted its construction planning for Brisbane Airport was on track, says it can start construction at the new site next month. It has been more than two years since the Australian and Queensland governments signed away a $940 million equity and support package to attract California-based PsiQuantum to this country.

There are some crazy mixed-up themes coming out of the ever-more-mainstream discussions about artificial intelligence in this country. Take Tuesday. Andrew Charlton delivered a speech to the AFR’s AI Summit in Sydney in which he claimed that “trust” is the single biggest factor that decide whether and Australian AI industry will thrive or stall. “Trust,”: he says, “is the single factor, more than chips, more than capital, more than energy that will decide whether a local AI sector is successful,” before going on to announce that the government’s AI Safety Institute – parked within the Industry department – is now operational.

Pauline Hanson at the National Press Club this week drew a direct line between weak regulation of artificial intelligence and job losses.It doesn’t really matter whether you agree with what she put forward, the reality is that as an issue, AI policy has been claimed by a populist political movement. In fact, by definition this is now a populist issue, because it has been raised – in the absence of meaningful mainstream discussion by the dominant political parties – by Pauline Hanson. Job displacement through AI is a scary issue for many people. The empty space left by the major parties in addressing this scary issue has now been filled by Pauline Hanson. Of course it has.

Defence tech startups in the US are repurposing automotive chips and pipes used in fracking – while copying production methods from drug makers – in an effort to deliver weapons to the Pentagon faster and at lower cost. Soaring demand for rocket motors used to power missiles and other weapons has spurred new thinking about...

Defence Industry minister Pat Conroy does not believe that Australian ownership and the control that ownership infers is not the most important ingredient for building a sovereign industrial base. But he goes on to argue that the federal government has significantly bolstered efforts to build more Australian defence ‘primes’. In Defence parlance, these are the companies that can design, build and service complete systems – like Boeing delivering a complete airplane, rather than a supplier building one of its parts. At the National Press Club on Wednesday, Minister Conroy delivered a spirited defence of why Australia ownership is only one determinant of what makes up a “sovereign” industry.

The federal government has pushed to get research translation at the centre of industry policy, but policy debate has shifted from funding to finding organisations willing to become first customers for Australian technology. Government procurement is a powerful lever Australian governments can pull to help deep tech companies cross the “missing middle” between promising technology and a scalable business, according to Cicada Innovations’ CEO Liza Noonan.

The Australian Business Growth Fund was set up in 2020 as a public-private partnership by the former Coalition government just as the Covid-19 virus was spooling up for maximum impact. In the years since, it has quietly been filling a gap in our funding markets. The initial $540 million in capital that enabled the ABGF included $100 million of federal government money, with another $100 million each from the big four banks and $20 million each from HSBC and Macquarie.

US Senate majority leader John Thune moved on Saturday to advance a major bill that would create a regulatory framework for cryptocurrencies which, if passed, would mark a huge victory for US President Donald Trump and the crypto industry. Mr Thune, a Republican, early Saturday morning filed to set up a key procedural vote on the Clarity Act when the Senate returns from its August recess in mid-September, potentially paving the way for a full floor vote on the bill, according to the US Senate press gallery website.