The Morrison government’s election budget halves petrol excise for six months and gives handouts to taxpayers, pensioners and welfare recipients in a cash splash aimed at clawing back votes. Treasurer Josh Frydenberg, who unveiled the giveaway budget in Parliament House on Tuesday night, has been able to juggle big spending with a reduced deficit thanks… Read more »
Federal treasurer Josh Frydenberg hands down his fourth and final budget before the federal election on Tuesday evening and the startup sector is hopeful that as it prepares to head to the polls, the Morrison government will address a range of issues facing tech. So what’s on the wish list? We spoke to a range… Read more »
Gold Coast-based Gilmour Space Technologies has received a $52 million grant from the federal government for its collaborative project bringing together more than 30 local space tech startups, and universities. The Australian Space Manufacturing Network (ASMN) was awarded Modern Manufacturing Initiative Collaboration (MMIC) grant for the development of sovereign space capabilities in Australia. The grant… Read more »
Opposition leader Anthony Albanese has pledged to work with the tech sector to help create another 340,000 jobs by 2030 if Labor wins the May federal election. While the headline in the Opposition announcement is 1.2 million jobs, the sector already employs around 860,000 people and the Tech Council of Australia (TCA) last year set… Read more »
It has been nearly a year since I last addressed Blockchain Australia Week. When I made that address, I announced that the Select Committee which I Chaired – then called the Senate Select Committee on Financial Technology and Regulatory Technology – would be extended under new Terms of Reference. These Terms of Reference would focus… Read more »
Social media giant Facebook says it will crackdown on misinformation on the platform in the lead up to the federal election in May, but Reset Australia says the plan is a “woefully inadequate” distraction from the bigger problems embedded in the business. Facebook’s parent company Meta announced this week that it will ramp up third-party… Read more »
Consultation on expansion of the Consumer Data Right (CDR) to open finance has been kicked off by the Australian government. A consultation paper released today calls for public input on datasets to be considered from non-bank lending providers, offering fintechs the chance to develop innovative consumer use cases. Earlier this year, the federal government announced… Read more »
The Australian Government has backed plans to build a $66 million Adelaide-based manufacturing hub for the space industry with a $20 million grant towards the project. The Space Manufacturing Hub, first revealed last December, is a collaboration between the South Australian government and four local startups: nano-satellite maker Fleet Space Technologies, quantum technologies developer Q-CTRL and… Read more »
Prime Minister Scott Morrison has flatly opposed the bid led by tech billionaire Mike Cannon-Brookes to buy Australia’s biggest energy company AGL and spend A$20 billion switching it to renewables. This includes closing its coal power stations by 2030. As Morrison stated this week: We need to ensure that our coal-fired generation of electricity runs… Read more »
https://ia.acs.org.au/article/2022/government-building-national-facial-recognition-database.html
Tesla’s $60,000 entry level electric vehicle, the Model 3, accounted for 60% of all new EV sales in 2021. Figures released by the Electric Vehicle Council, which has exclusive access to the notoriously secret sales figures for Elon Musk’s EV brand, revel Tesla imported 12,094 Model 3 cars to Australia last year. Because Tesla sells… Read more »
Scott Morrison will continue to tip out large dollops of money when he addresses the National Press Club on Tuesday, with his theme “building national resilience”. He will announce the government will fund a $2.2 billion Research Commercialisation Action Plan, which includes about $2 billion in new money The centrepiece is a 10-year $1.6 billion… Read more »
An Australian software developer has accused Australian border authorities of abusing their power to search his phone when returning home from a recent holiday. Taking to Reddit to share his experience with others, the traveller, James, says he has concerns that the Customs Act allows officers at the border to force people to hand over… Read more »
Before Australia’s recent changes to COVID testing, working out when we reached the peak of cases was, in principal, straightforward. We looked at the numbers of new daily cases, diagnosed via PCR. From there, we worked out a range of other key indicators related to COVID spread, testing and hospitalisation – each dependent on those… Read more »
There was some good news buried in the headline numbers of the federal government’s Mid-Year Economic and Fiscal Outlook (MYEFO) for Australia’s video gaming industry. The upbeat MYEFO forecasts have the combined deficits over the coming four years to FY25 falling by $2.3 on the May budget forecast to $342.4 billion. The FY22 deficit has… Read more »
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