Assistant Minister for Innovation Wyatt Roy was treated to a rock-star reception at a Melbourne tech conference. Photo: AFR
For companies that can be profitable one day but dead the next week, a month is a very long time.
A whole month has passed since the federal government announced its $20,000 tax break, but start-up investor Adrian Stone has not heard a single founder mention any of the new measures introduced to boost the small end of town.
Mr Stone has invested in more than 40 start-ups, and co-ordinates AngelCube, one of Australia's leading accelerator programs, which is based in Melbourne's busiest tech start-up co-working hub.
He told Fairfax Media the budget's tax concessions may have hit the mark for small businesses, but it was largely irrelevant for early-stage high-growth companies.
"Tax breaks and advantages aimed at small business do nothing for start-ups because they don't pay tax for many years, because any money they make is invested straight back into the business," Mr Stone said.
The federal government may have pitched the budget as one to boost new businesses, but the start-up community remains sceptical that the government can ever encourage technology innovation if it continually describes it as small business.
Their concerns are not without grounds. Treasurer Joe Hockey routinely suggests the budget will help the next Uber and AirBnB, effectively categorising these high-risk high-growth enterprises fuelled by millions in venture capital alongside three-person accounting companies or local cafes.
But if the budget failed to hit the mark for start-ups, it hasn't phased Liberal member of parliament Wyatt Roy, who wants to address the lack of targeted technology innovation policies.
Mr Roy says he understand the start-up community's frustration with the government, but says change is on its way, even as early as this year.
"Start-ups are cynical about government but we're changing," Mr Roy said.
"I feel we get taken to task a lot about not understanding and being able to articulate the difference between start-ups and small businesses, but we're getting there."
Mr Roy has been lobbying internally for months for the creation of a government-wide policy to encourage technology entrepreneurship, similar to the overarching competition and industry policies.
"I'm optimistic that we can launch something spot on for start-ups by the end of year. There are lots of ideas going on in conversations with the Prime Minister, the Treasurer, the ministers for communication and small business."
Core to Mr Roy's proposed approach would be increased government recognition of start-ups to drive cultural change, adding mandatory business training to school curriculum and possibly even targeted co-investment schemes.
The government has resolved taxation issues around employee share schemes and promised a similar fix to crowd-sourced equity fundraising, finally putting Australia on an equal footing with countries gunning for tech talent such as New Zealand, the United Kingdom and Israel, all of which have a cross-portfolio program to drive entrepreneurship.
Mr Roy is not the only one lobbying for this style of government engagement. A whole-government policy was one of the first recommendations in a policy assessment report released by peak body StartupAUS in April.
The report included detailed recommendations for policy changes successfully piloted in other countries, such as a capital gains exemption for investments in tech companies and loosening migration policies to cover skills shortages.
The report's author, StartupAUS board member Colin Kinner, said the government was moving in the right direction, but too slowly.
"It's time we followed other countries in which we're seeing a very clear focus on investing in and backing the highest-growth companies, which are almost uniformly technology ones," Mr Kinner said.
"We can't stop the brain drain, but that happens everywhere. The important factor is, Do they keep a presence here, and do they return? We can fix that, but we need to be moving much faster."
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