Address to Knowledge Nation

E&OE TRANSCRIPT
Knowledge Nation
10 December 2015

SUBJECT: National Innovation and Science Agenda.

CHRISTOPHER PYNE: Thank you very much Nicholas, to you, to Paul Kelly, to Elena and particularly to the Prime Minister who unleashed that inner revolutionary to run amok. I’m not sure the Treasurer or the Finance Minister are as keen on me running amok in the ministerial wing as the Prime Minister and I are. It is a great pleasure to be responsible for the National Innovation and Science Agenda and there is so much that can be said about it and the Prime Minister has introduced many of the key elements of it today.

There are 24 different measures so it is a vast comprehensive change, a transformative document in a big domestic, policy agenda which is about jobs and growth. But just to give you an idea of the success that it’s already having, in terms of the vibe in the country and the momentum that it is gaining already after only, what, 3.5 days, not even that. The website’s already had 170,000 views, 15.6 million impressions of the #IdeasBoom on Twitter alone which is quite dramatic.

It trended- it was the top trending hashtag for 24 hours, out-trending President Obama’s speech on gun control, in Australia, which is pretty remarkable and the animated video introducing the ideas boom has already had over 400,000 views on Twitter, Facebook and the Youtube, already this week.

But importantly, it’s having another effect. As the Prime Minister said we announced $26 million for quantum computing which has a real capacity to change the way we think about data and computing in Australia but also could be worth billions of dollars to our economy in the years ahead and Commonwealth Bank came out instantly and added $10 million and Telstra came out straight after them and added $10 million so that $26 million has already become $46 million.

The enthusiasm that the Prime Minister has generated around venture capital and startups and the ideas part of the economy has already led the Group of Eight who are great friends of mine, of course, as the former education minister, but not known to be at the cutting edge of risk taking, the great sandstone universities, and we do love them because they are world class, but they’ve already announced a $200 million venture capital fund that they are funding.

And a lot of the reforms that are part of the NICA are not about government giving money to the private sector, they are about driving the private sector to invest, to take risks, to enable risks, to commercialize research with some government support but the Biomedical Translation Fund which Bill Ferris, who is here, has been championing, that’s not about government money, it’s about using government money to double it and treble it with private sector investment. And the CSIRO Innovation Fund is exactly the same, taking public research in our national institutions and the CSIRO and partnering with the private sector with investors to double and treble that investment in research across the economy.

In terms of the way the Government is behaving, I must say I do congratulate the bureaucracy for their extraordinary agility and nimbleness, not something we’ve always been known for, in bringing this together in 12 weeks. The Government showed all of the same character traits that we want to see in startups and the economy, we were nimble, agile, there were no silos, all the departments came together, we drove a process where nobody was able to say no, there was no passive aggression in the public service. It was all about what can we do to deliver before Christmas, a National Innovation and Science Agenda, a big domestic policy change that will drive the way we think about our country, as Paul Kelly said, we are changing the way we think about ourselves as Australians.

And we wanted to do it before Christmas, but we didn’t want until February or March next year because then there’s the Budget, then there’s an election, then there’s- at the end of the year, we wanted the public service to realise that we were serious about this and that come mid-December, we wanted them to be hard at it and I know that the Innovation and Science has already started meeting. The way we are going to deliver this NISA, the taskforce within the department, it’s called Delivery Unit now is meeting on Monday, the first meeting of the Delivery Unit.

And it’s important for you all to know that yes, we’ve made a big announcement but delivery is now the next big challenge, the implementation is going to be really, really important. So we’ve changed the way we’re going to do that too. There’ll be a Innovation and Science Sub-Committee of the Cabinet which I’ll be obviously working to- as part of. But beyond that, there’ll be an inter-departmental committee which sounds bureaucratic but there are nine departments involved in this and Ian Watt will be brought back out of retirement to chair that.

Below that there’ll be a Delivery Unit, like Tony Blair’s Delivery Unit when he was the prime minister of Britain, who’s only jobs is the nuts and bolts of delivering this agenda across the economy, across government and that’ll bring the smartest, brightest, most ambitious, wise and young people together in the Department of Industry, Innovation and Science, taking from Prime Minister and Cabinet and from Treasury and from Immigration and elsewhere to drive the actual implementation. We don’t want this just to be a very positive change in the way we think, we actually want to see change happen on the ground.

So, yes, I am excited, as excited as Elena, I’m as excited as the Prime Minister, I’ve even seen Paul Kelly- I’ve never seen him quite so excited as he is about this agenda and I’m looking forward to its delivery and thank you all very much for what you’ve done already and what you will do over the coming months and years to ensure that we don’t just announce a great change but will deliver it, embed it and it becomes part of our national way of thinking. Thank you very much…[applause].