US tech pioneer Vint Cerf, the man dubbed “father of the internet” for his work co-designing TCP/IP protocols, has backed his employer, Google, in its fight against the Australian government’s plans to make tech giants Google and Facebook pay media companies for using their content. Cerf, who has worked for Google as a vice president and… Read more »
Female startup founders in Victoria will have access to $10 million in angel investment under a new fund announced in the state budget today. Treasurer Tim Pallas allocated $10 million towards the Women Founders Angel Sidecar Fund while hoping it will unlock a further $30 million in private sector equity. The funds are part of… Read more »
Video game production is worth around $250 billion annually, but Australia’s slice of that pie is tiny – just $114 million. It’s so paltry New Zealand’s games industry generates more revenue, while the UK and Canadian game development industries are 10 times bigger than Australia’s. The local sector believes it can easily become a $1… Read more »
The NSW budget is shouting the state a $250 million lunch, even as the 2021 financial year will post an historic $16 billion deficit as Treasurer Dominic Perrottet grapples with the impact of Covid-19 on Australia’s most populous state. The FY20 deficit was $6.9 billion. It will take until 2025 before the NSW budget is back… Read more »
A timeless tradition in political journalism is trying to find a narrative that explains an electoral outcome. A widely accepted narrative to explain Barack Obama’s win over John McCain in 2008 was that Americans wanted to embrace the “change” candidate who appeared the most dissimilar to then-President George W Bush. The narrative four years later… Read more »
Owing to the large numbers of mail ballots, counting in some states has been very slow. What we know is that Donald Trump won Florida, Texas, Ohio and Iowa. With the exception of Florida, these states were regarded as only winnable for Biden if he won by a landslide. Trump is narrowly ahead with almost… Read more »
Paul Fletcher, the federal communications minister in charge of the $55.5 billion national broadband rollout, has evoked tractor production under the Soviets to defend the Coalition government’s seven-year handling of the NBN roll-out. In a speech to the CommsDay Summit yesterday, Fletcher evoked the spectre of “those apocryphal Japanese soldiers found in remote jungles in… Read more »
This year has been a thunderclap to so much of what we assumed to be normal. While some parts of the economy, by virtue of the pandemic restrictions, were frozen in place, others had to accelerate at warp speed. But all of us have had to adapt and to find a place of resilience and… Read more »
The budget deficit is projected to hit $213.6 billion, a record 11% of GDP, before winding back: Instead of falling, as predicted in the last budget, debt will climb: There’s spending and tax cuts a plenty: It’s expected to bring about a bounce-back in economic growth: But much depends on the assumptions, including a return… Read more »
The delayed 2020 federal budget, delivered by Treasurer Josh Frydenberg in the wake of the damage wrought by Covid-19 contained a major unexpected win for the startup sector over the R&D Tax Incentive. Amid a massive $213.7 billion deficit for this year – and $480.5 billion over the next four years, there were accelerated income… Read more »
Tax cuts aren’t the half of it. The personal income tax cuts promised in the budget will cost A$17.8 billion over four years. The measures aimed at supporting businesses – the temporary instant tax write off of capital investments, the temporary ability to use losses to reduce previous tax payments, the JobMaker hiring credit and… Read more »
Accelerated tax cuts, cash splashes for pensioners, massive incentives for business to invest and a subsidy to hire unemployed people are the centrepieces of the Morrison government’s COVID-19 budget. More than 11 million taxpayers will get a tax cut backdated to July 1, giving lower and middle-income earners tax relief this financial year of up… Read more »
Not many stories can compete with the run up to a federal budget, especially one with a deficit like none of us has ever seen, income tax cuts, and much else besides. But Donald Trump’s COVID infection certainly has done so in the last few days, especially given the official lying surrounding it and the… Read more »
As we head into the budget, many of the nation’s more than 2.3 million small businesses will be watching for measures to aid the recovery of this key sector of the economy. A recent Xero survey found 17% of small business owners believed the sector should be the central focus of the budget, and nearly… Read more »
The 2020-2021 Budget, to be delivered by the Treasurer next Tuesday, will be arguably one of the most important, if not the most important since the end of the Second World War. This year, the global economy is forecast to contract by around 4.5%. The world economy during the GFC declined by 0.1%. So in… Read more »
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