The wait is over (and we know you’ve been waiting)!
The Expert Panel for the Strategic Examination of R&D (SERD) has released its Final Report: Ambitious Australia.
As far as the R&D Tax Incentive (RDTI) has been concerned, it’s been a bumpy ride. Left out of the original Terms Of Reference, a wave of submissions were received highlighting the role of the RDTI as a central tenet of Australian innovation policy and one that needed to be front and centre of any systemic review.
As a result, the Panel produced an R&D Incentives Issues Paper that made a series of recommendations and many of these appear in the Ambitious Australia report. Rather than reproducing the recommendations in this Update, MJA will review the details in the coming days and provide analysis via future editions of the MJA Update.
However, at first glance, it is difficult to alter the conclusion we reached earlier with regards to the position taken in the Issues Paper.
The stated aim in both the Paper and the Report was to simplify and better target the existing RDTI system. If that’s the case, then these recommendations fail to achieve the objective.
In fairness, there are some sensible improvements and changes recommended, and we will highlight these in subsequent editions. But there are real problems with some of the assumptions made by the Panel, the basic nomenclature used and the fact that several of the ideas put forward (e.g., quarterly rebate payments in certain circumstances) have previously not survived the pathway to being legislated.
The arm’s length nature of the SERD review process, where only limited public consultation sessions occurred and interested parties were confined to written submissions only, has led to a feeling that the SERD Panel has been playing catch up since they forgot to include the RDTI in the original Terms Of Reference. This lack of engagement has resulted in several compounding errors in its recommendations.
There is an acute irony in the fact that these recommendations have emerged the day after it was announced that DISR and the ATO had ‘retired” the RDTI Stakeholder Reference Group, ending the last remaining consultative mechanism available to the Australian innovation community with respect to the program.
As we head next to the political reaction, the word, ‘engagement’, must be front and centre. MJA will do its utmost to ensure that this happens.
Should you wish to discuss any aspect of this article, do not hesitate to contact MJA.