Submission—Australian Government’s economic reform roundtable

On 26 July 2025, the Academy made a submission on the Australian Government’s economic reform roundtable.

Download submission (PDF, 296KB)

The Australian Academy of Science is calling for an urgent national conversation on R&D investment in Australia.

The economic reform roundtable and strategic examination of R&D together provide a rare opportunity to create policy settings that enables R&D to thrive and in so doing improve economic complexity and growth and to enable Australia to participate and compete in a technologically advanced world.

The Academy proposes:

• Incentivising business R&D investment by applying a 0.25% or 0.5% R&D levy to businesses with annual revenue of $100 million or more, with offsets available to those businesses that invest in R&D. The levy revenue would be quarantined invested in research to contribute to discovery and breakthroughs that drive productivity and economic growth.
• Implementing a long-term national high-performance computing and data (HPCD) strategy and roadmap to build national capacity, with targeted investment in next-generation HPCD infrastructure, as the essential underpinning infrastructure required to support research and industry growth.

More information

Submission—Strategic Examination of Research and Development

Issues paper: Incentivising business investment in R&D

Why investment in Australia’s supercomputing should matter to every Australian