This "Innovation" is a Charade

It is time to stop the charade!  The Victoria Government's innovation strategy is a destructive joke.

Last month I was at a conference attended by well-informed Australian and Asian business people, where Minister for Innovation John Brumby lauded the many supposed successes of his government's innovation strategy.

When he claimed that Melbourne was the centre of the funds management industry in the Asia Pacific region, ripples of suppressed laughter spread through the audience.

When he went on to brazenly claim that Melbourne had a thriving aeronautical industry, the laughter spread further.

OK, these are just harmless absurdities.  Moreover, the Bracks Government should not be held responsible for failing to turn Melbourne into a combination of Toulouse and Hong Kong.

However, when Mr Brumby went on to laud his government's actions on agricultural biotechnology and the food industry, the absurdities become serious.

These are two areas in which Victoria has a real and substantial industrial base and scope for expansion, but because of policies of the Bracks Government, they are going backwards.

The Bracks Government's recent decision to ban commercial trials of GM food crops, despite clearance on health, safety and marketing grounds, has effectively killed the agricultural biotechnology industry in the state.

Numerous research programs have already been stopped by the decisions.

Researchers may be willing to continue with pre-commercial research, but only if it is government funded.

And of course if this research ever gets to a commercial stage, it will need TO go elsewhere, resulting in Victorian taxpayers underwriting the commercial ventures of foreigners.

Victoria has a large food processing sector with much potential, but it also is going backwards.

This sector is currently undergoing a major restructuring worldwide.

Accordingly the Victorian industry faces a major challenge.

But the biggest impediment to the local industry successfully meeting this challenge is the inflexible nature of the industrial relations environment in the state, aided and abetted by the government.

These policy failures could be fixed quickly and cheaply.

Instead, the government not only avoids doing so, but pretends they do not exist and uses its $321 million Innovation Strategy to buy silence from the industry.

For example, in June it sent a huge contingent of bureaucrats and friends to BIO 2004 in San Francisco and launched its new Biotechnology Strategy.

Both at the conference and in the strategy itself, the government lauded its supposed successes in agricultural biotechnology, and blindly avoided mentioning the fact that it had just banned the technology for food crops.

At BioFest, a government subsidised conference, last week, Mr Brumby announced that he had lured a major international agricultural biotechnology conference to Melbourne in 2006.  This is like funding a "Life.  Be in It" campaign at the Melbourne morgue.

As for the food industry, the government has responded to the shrinking industry, not with improvements to the industrial relations climate, but with waves of bureaucrats and grants to help market food to Asia.

As if Cadbury Schweppes and Heinz need help in marketing.

The state's future would be much brighter if the government eliminated Innovations, gave the money back in the form of tax cuts, and instead simply allowed the private sector to get on with its business.

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