Michael Keenan (Stirling, Liberal Party, Shadow Assistant Treasurer) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I would like to raise in this House another case of Labor’s extraordinary failure to support Australian enterprise. In an ill-thought-out cost-cutting measure which will have a detrimental effect on the Australian economy, the Rudd Labor government has scrapped the flagship industry development program Commercial Ready. Commercial Ready was introduced by the Howard government in 2004. It provided around $200 million per year in individual grants, from one-quarter of a million dollars up to $5 million, to small companies to assist them to bring new and innovative products to market.

Since 2004, $11.3 million has funded local research and development projects in my electorate of Stirling alone. Many companies used a Commercial Ready grant to leverage extra venture capital funds from the private sector. Up to 20 per cent of Commercial Ready grants went to the often high-risk biotech sector, where it is very hard to get private venture capital. In the past, Commercial Ready has funded further clinical trials for more than five cancer treatments. Solbec Pharmaceuticals, in the light industrial area of Osborne Park within my electorate, was given a landmark $2.25 million Commercial Ready grant to develop an anticancer drug. Under a Labor government this company will not have the support to put this anticancer drug into its next phase of development and to ultimately help people in Australia with cancer.

Another company in my local area affected by Labor’s scrapping of the program is Osborne Park based airframe testing technology company Structural Monitoring Systems. Structural Monitoring Systems received $2.9 million, one of the largest ever Commercial Ready grants that has been awarded to a Western Australian company. The grant helped SMS to commercialise an in-flight structural health monitoring system that is able to continuously monitor the development of any cracks in an aircraft. This reduces costs of maintenance, increases air weight performance, increases the safety of air travel and is lightweight and therefore environmentally beneficial. All of the major international aerospace companies—Boeing, Airbus and Embraer—have already taken a particular interest, as have militaries from around the world. This is a small Osborne Park based company attracting the interests of all the international majors in aerospace that has now been delivered a very harsh blow by this new government. Structural Monitoring Systems employs local people. It keeps experienced engineers and scientists in WA. I have no doubt about the robustness of this company—the product that they are selling is extraordinary—but I think that they, as a small business in my electorate, can expect to have the support of the government to commercialise this extraordinary venture.

This is an example of a government that has no idea about the consequences of its actions. Scrapping the Commercial Ready program breaks an election commitment given by Senator Carr, who promised to shave only a small amount of $160 million from this program and not to abolish it. (Time expired)