Justin Hendry

The Digital Transformation Agency is continuing to struggle to meet its obligations under the Commonwealth Procurement Rules, three years after it was first pulled up for widespread non-compliance. A follow-up audit by the Australian National Audit Office found the DTA's attempts to reform its procurement practices have been only “partly effective”, while the agency is still failing to demonstrate value for money in its purchasing decisions. The DTA has pushed back against the findings, arguing they “[do not] reasonably reflect the significant efforts applied to improve procurement practices” since the original audit in September 2022.

Six companies each claimed more than $100 million through Australia's research and development tax incentive in the 2022-23 financial year, with new claims totaling $1.2 billion. Newly released Tax Office data shows Atlassian was the top user of the scheme for a second year in a row, claiming $220 million, followed by Andrew Forrest’s Fortescue ($151 million) and hearing implant company Cochlear ($137 million).The other biggest users of the scheme offering tax breaks for eligible R&D activities include flour manufacturer Manildra, CSL and sleep device maker Resmed, together claiming $336 million.

Australia is backing a small Pacific nation to set up a pilot public cloud environment, as the federal government looks to deepen its ties in the region and head off Beijing’s influence attempts. A select group of “trusted industry partners” were invited to tender for the work this week by the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade in one of the first examples of Australia brokering a cloud computing contract for the region. The cloud transformation, which will include a total of three phases, will see the unnamed Pacific nation government become “cloud-ready” in the space of 14 months, tender documents show.

American defence technology startup Anduril has secured a $1.7 billion contract with the Royal Australian Navy to build a new fleet of unmanned military submarines with strike capabilities in Australia. The extra-large autonomous undersea vehicles (XL-AUV), known as Ghost Sharks, emerged production ready after more than three years of work on an affordable, long endurance AUV capable of handling a variety of payloads. Defence minister Richard Marles and Defence Industry minister Pat Conroy announced the five-year contract with the Australian subsidiary of American military tech firm Anduril on Wednesday.

Startups and SMEs would be treated differently to large enterprises under changes to the R&D Tax Incentive proposed through the Strategic Examination of Research and Development. Tax breaks would also be more closely targeted at all levels of the technology readiness spectrum, as the purpose of the offset shifts from broad-based support to novel and transformational R&D. But new conditions and eligibility requirements on large enterprises and SMEs have also been proposed to ensure the program focus on novel and transformational R&D and efforts that align with national priorities.

Australia’s peak tech industry lobby has urged the federal government to adopt an R&D investment target of 2 per cent of GDP by 2035, putting it at odds with other industry groups and the research community. The proposal would shave a full percentage off the 3 per cent target that has become a consensus view among the country's leading science, research and business groups in recent years .But Tech Council chief executive Damian Kassabgi says the goal is a more “realistic” given Australia’s R&D spending has been trending down since 2008 and now sits a whole percentage point behind other developed nations.

Federal government agencies may have barely scratched the surface with artificial intelligence, but those that have are increasingly finding themselves trapped in AI 'PoC hell’. That’s according to the deputy head of the Digital Transformation agency, Lucy Poole, who has flagged the emerging risk across the Australian Public Services as AI experimentation ramps up. Speaking at the ServiceNow Federal Forum in Canberra on Tuesday, Ms Poole said the public sector's natural aversion to risk, as well as the lingering effects of the Robodebt scandal on trust, were dampening public sector confidence with AI.

Productivity Commission chair Danielle Wood has dashed hopes of early reforms to R&D settings through the productivity roundtable process, declaring it a matter for the Strategic Examination of R&D. Amid renewed calls to remove the cap on the R&D Tax Incentive, Ms Wood this week named R&D as one of the areas that has been “carved out” of the Commission's five pillars inquiries process to avoid duplicating effort. “We kind of carved out the R&D space from our review because [the SERD] is going on. That review is incredibly important,” she said during an interview with King & Wood Mallesons partners at the law firm’s Digital Future Summit on Thursday.

Amazon has won a major contract with NBN Co to deliver high-speed internet services to parts of rural and regional Australia using its network of low-Earth orbit (LEO) satellites. NBN Co revealed the deal with Amazon's Project Kuiper subsidiary on Tuesday, ending a months long process that had the Jeff Bezos-backed company ahead of the federal election. It comes as the market share of Elon Musk's Starlink continues to grow, often at the expense of NBN Co's ageing geostationary satellite Sky Muster, stoking sovereignty fears among policy makers.

A privacy watchdog probe into radiology giant I-MED has cleared the company of wrongdoing over handing millions of patient medical scans to local diagnostic AI startup Harrison.ai. Last year, Crikey revealed patient concerns that data from Australia's largest diagnostic imaging provider had been used to train Harrison.ai's first AI medical imaging solution, Annalise.ai, without consent. Annalise.ai -- which has been trained on more than 800,000 images -- can read chest X-rays and help detect conditions in under 10 seconds, effectively giving clinicians a second set of eyes.