Australia leads the world on several technology fronts, but the Morrison government needs to accelerate industry digitisation or the country will lose its competitive advantage, the IT sector’s peak body, the Australian Information Industry Association (AIIA) has warned. The organisation, which is backed by computer giants Dell and IBM, as well as Telstra, has produced… Read more »
Earth has warmed 1.09℃ since pre-industrial times and many changes such as sea-level rise and glacier melt are now virtually irreversible, according to the most sobering report yet by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). The report also found escape from human-caused climate change is no longer possible. Climate change is now affecting every… Read more »
Over the past few weeks, the Chinese government’s crackdown on big tech companies has intensified. The giants have all felt the brunt of heightened regulatory scrutiny. At the end of last year, Ant Group (which owns the payment platform AliPay) failed to go public on the stock market. Chinese regulators cited a lack of compliance… Read more »
From condo salesman to reality TV host to leader of the free world, Donald Trump has occupied several lifetimes’ worth of identities over a remarkable career of reinventions. Even so, the billionaire mogul’s latest metamorphosis – into a consumer-rights plaintiff seeking to regulate big business – is a peculiar one. With a volley of lawsuits… Read more »
On budget night federal Treasurer Josh Frydenberg announced Australia is getting its own “patent box”. What is a patent box? Despite its odd name, it is a relatively straightforward concept. It means lowering the tax rate on all income derived from patents registered in a nation. About half the members of the European Union, Britain… Read more »
The federal budget for 2021-22 promises A$1.2 billion over the next six years to support the Digital Economy Strategy, a plan to make Australia “a leading digital economy and society by 2030”. The Digital Economy Strategy proclaims We are well placed to be a leading digital economy and have strong foundations, but many countries are… Read more »
Nearly all the good news in this week’s budget was announced ahead of Treasurer Josh Frydenberg detailing the government’s plans for the year ahead. Nonetheless, we asked many in the startup and tech sector what they thought of the 2021 budget. Here are their reactions: Rebecca Schot-Guppy CEO, FinTech Australia There weren’t too many… Read more »
A Labor government would offer 2000 university students and recent graduates loans of up to $11,300 through the HELP system to cover the cost of taking part in an accelerator program to launch their own startups. Opposition leader Anthony Albanese announced the ‘Startup Year’ plan in his Budget reply speech on Thursday night. Labor said… Read more »
A coalition of business, technology, venture capital and social impact leaders, led by Canva co-founder Cameron Adams, have written an open letter to the Morrison government calling on Canberra to stop investing in fossil fuels and abandon its “gas-led recovery”. The letter seeks a renewable energy target of 100% by 2030, with Australia reaching net… Read more »
A program offering up to $250,000 to support startup incubators was closed by the federal government on budget night as treasurer Josh Frydenberg the government’s innovation credentials. The Incubator Support Initiative offered between $13,000 to $250,000 of funding for up to two years for incubator projects, covering up to 65% of the cost in regional… Read more »
A Labor government would provide support for aspiring young entrepreneurs to spend a business-focused year working with a university or private sector incubator to develop their startup enterprise or idea. The Startup Year proposal, in Anthony Albanese’s Thursday night budget reply, would offer places for up to 2000 students. The scheme would run for a… Read more »
Scottish writer Sir Walter Scott wrote: “The hour’s come and the man” and 180 years later, the phrase that launched a million memes could equally apply to the tech industry. Except in last night’s federal budget, in tech’s finest hour, it could barely be seen in treasurer Josh Frydenberg’s announcements. I’ll be blunt: when the… Read more »
Tax concessions worth $206 million on income from derived from Australian medical and biotechnology patents is one of the few headline investments for the tech and startup sector in the 2021 federal budget by treasurer Josh Frydenberg. The Government is offering a Patent Box regime with a low 17% corporate tax rate to boost Australian… Read more »
Treasurer Josh Frydenberg unveiled the full picture of the Morrison government’s 2021 budget tonight, following a series of headline announcements over recent weeks. Among the key details of a Coalition government that previously sought to hammer the Labor opposition over its deficit budgets during the GFC a decade earlier was the fact that the budget… Read more »
After 20 years of rhetoric from both sides of politics focusing on getting back to surplus, this year’s budget continues pandemic spending in the hope of getting the economy back on track as the pandemic starts to settle. The projected deficit is $161 billion for 2021-22, but rather than tackling this in the next four… Read more »
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