ANDREW PARFITT, VICE CHANCELLOR OF UTS: It’s a great honour to have the Minister for Industry and Science, Ed Husic here today, to talk about an exciting announcement. Welcome, also, to people from our startup community and some of the supporters of that community. This space has been in the making for a while. It’s a showcase for some of our student startups, and thanks to Murray Hurps we have a very sizable program of student startups here. I think we have 500 active startups at the moment and nearly close to a thousand startups over the past four years. 

And right on this corner, the busiest street corner in Sydney, we’ve been able to create a place to showcase that activity and the important work that’s done. Sixty per cent of our students coming into the university say they want to engage in entrepreneurship and startups. And so, what a fantastic opportunity to stimulate that interest and excitement to the benefits of many sectors – from environmental sustainability, medical devices and so forth. 

So very excited about today’s announcement, about government’s involvement in this space. Minister, thank you for coming. 

ED HUSIC, MINISTER FOR INDUSTRY AND SCIENCE: Thank you. Good on you. 

Thanks, everyone. And I also wanted to start by acknowledging the Gadigal people of the Eora Nation, the custodians of this land and pay my respects to elders both past and present. 

I also want to acknowledge that I represent the electorate of Chifley, which sits on Darug lands, and I also want to pay my respects to their elders past, present and emerging and any Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people here today. 

It is a great pleasure to be here at UTS. There are a number of reasons why I wanted to be here. One of the biggest reasons is standing over there in Murray Hurps. Murray, you have been a pillar for Australia’s startup community over many years. I’ve had enormous respect for what you’ve done to contribute but not just only in the way you’ve helped the people in the immediate orbit in which you exist, but you really are the embodiment of someone who doesn’t see this as a job but a passion. And we need people like yourself and the others that are in the community to maintain the focus on the vital reason why we need to do this, not just from an economic perspective but also from the point of view about what it does for national wellbeing as well. 

And so, if I was going to do this stage in what we are seeking to achieve, I really felt strongly about being able to do this here with you, as such a strong supporter. So, thank you for everything that you’ve done. 

In terms of UTS as well, Andrew, thank you for the welcome and also the reflection on the fact that about 500 startups have been supported just in one year alone. I think there have been close to 450 paid jobs created here through the last year, which is huge. And this is part of the reason why we’re reinvigorating the focus on this initiative or this space. It speaks to the importance of startups to the economy. And a big thing for us is we’ve had Treasury at a federal level already say that the amount of business dynamism that exists in the economy is not strong enough – we need to do more to rev that up. And this is part of what we’re trying to do. 

Ideas can start small, but they can spread across the world. If you look at Melanie Perkins and Cliff Obrecht from Canva and what they’ve been able to achieve, they are, you know, one of the few unicorn companies in this country, but it was a business idea that sprang from helping schools design their own yearbooks and from that, they built Canva, which is now used by 75 million people in over 190 countries. And so, we want ideas that could be local that uplift local communities but also have global reach as well. 

There are also others that have had impacts from their ideas. Seer Data, which provides communities from Bourke in New South Wales to Kalgoorlie in WA, they’ve got the ability to access and control data about themselves for their own benefit. The ideas can be transformative. Indigital is another firm that I’m hugely impressed with and proud of. They use augmented reality to help people connect with some of Australia’s oldest stories, the stories of First Nations people, across educational and corporate settings. So, you know, this is all really important that we start basically lifting this up, scaling this up at a wider level. 

So that’s why what we’re doing, we want to be able to open up a new chapter on that. We want to send a signal that entrepreneurship for the country is really important. Governments should send a signal that setting up your own firm is really important for the economy but also for the community. And to be able to improve the quality of life and obviously make a contribution to the economy. 

Startup Year was a big election commitment of ours. What we want to do is effectively create the next generation of businesses by tapping into younger ideas, the energy of younger – younger Australians. But it can also be mature-aged students that are working or working their way through university as well and that have got an idea that they want to commercialise. So, our initiative will offer loans to 2,000 undergraduate students and current post-grad students through basically it will make a tweak to the HECS help system. So, you’ll get access to an interest-free loan of close or just over $11,000. And this will give a leg-up in terms of commercialising good ideas and, as I said, inject business dynamism into the economy. 

What we are saying that at this point in time, we do see a number of things happening that we have to address. One is there’s been – it’s been noted there’s been a contraction in the early-stage investment largely through angel investors. You’re seeing re-evaluations being made by venture capital. The cost of capital is becoming more expensive. 

Now, there’ll be pathways that people use to build their business and get the money that they need to give it the next leg-up to the next stage of their development. This is one mechanism we want to do. So if people in unis want to stay on one extra year, we want to be able to extend that system, create a startup year working with accelerators and incubators to make that happen and then have that layer of capital available for people to draw on at a time where they are finding it hard to get that money. 

We don’t need to stall. We can’t afford to stall in terms of growth of new firms. And that’s why we’re putting this forward. So, what we’re doing today is we are seeking people’s input and ideas into the development of that concept. And what we’re launching today is our consultation paper that says this is the idea that we have. We want to work with university incubators and accelerators. Universities Australia says there are about a hundred of these type of initiatives across the country. How do we work with them, encourage university students to stay on one extra year, get the advice they need to set up these 2,000 firms that we’re hoping, get that sustainable advice so that they can get a longer pathway to success or basically that they’ll be on a longer pathway to success. And what can we do to play a part to encourage people to get involved in that? 

The other thing I just want to tell you besides this – we see there’s an opportunity for us, and we’ve committed as a government, a new government, to seeing 1.2 million tech-related jobs in this country by 2030. We want to send a signal that is an important target to reach for. The reason being is that we should see those tech skills not just in the sector, in the tech sector, but that we spread that skill across industry. 

And we want two things to happen: one is obviously to deliver the skills needed to improve the way businesses work, making them much more efficient, open up new opportunities, hold on to existing customers, grow new ones. That’s important. But the thing that startups do that we need to encourage in the broader business ecosystem is this: You’re problem solvers. You see a problem, you see an opportunity, you go, “How do we actually get to that point where we can deliver?” That type of attitude, that type of characteristic, we need to broaden that in the wider economy. And that’s what we want to see happen. 

And so, Startup Year, the initiative of a target of 1.2 million tech jobs, the stuff that we’re doing as well I’ve committed to a national quantum strategy on quantum technology, robotics as well, we’ll be delivering those. And that will all feed into another big initiative that I’ll reference an end on, which is the National Reconstruction Fund. We want – I’ve said we want to extend capital to startups through this initiative, and we want to get your input into that through the consultation process I’m announcing today. 

But the other thing that we’re doing is creating a national co-investment fund, the National Reconstruction Fund - $15 billion targeting six key areas that will deliver future economic growth. And within that a $1 billion critical technologies fund that will look to see the development and emergence of new technologies in Australia and also create new opportunities for the country. 

And particularly on quantum technology, I feel really strongly about, you know, I recently spoke to the Pearcey Foundation. Trevor Pearcey in the 40s was one of the few people to develop a digital computer at that point in time. The US and UK had one. We were the fourth country to have our own computer. And we had Australians do it. And then we let go of the opportunity to create our own industry here. We don’t want to lose those opportunities. 

Startup Year, through to some of the other stuff that we’re doing on quantum, robotics, the National Reconstruction Fund, having the capital available to support ideas when they need it most so you don’t feel like your own country has turned its back on you and you have to leave our shores to get the support you need to grow. We want to end that. We want to close that down. We want to send the signal that what you do is really important to our longer-term success. 

So, with that, I will end up. Thank you very much for letting us be here today. I understand Murray’s got a number of you here and I’m keen to talk with you all. I think we’re also doing a Q&A session which I’m happy to participate in. But I just want to thank you for your time but, importantly, I want to thank you and encourage you to maintain your faith in what you’re doing because it’s important not just for yourselves but what we want to achieve as a country.

ENDS