Election result to boost channel as stimulus measures land

The re-election of the Liberal National party coalition means two big stimuli are probably on the way for the channel.

One will come from the extension and increased ceiling for the Instant Asset Write-Off program.

The program allows small businesses to fully-depreciate assets valued at up to $30,000 in the year they are purchased or installed. The federal budget saw the revenue ceiling for eligible businesses raised from $10 million to $50 million.

The program was one of the few election policies admired by attendees at CRN’s pre-election roundtable, at which Mitch Colton of Colton Computer Technologies said the policy “will make a difference.”

“The first year it came in, we saw people bring purchases forward. Stuff that they’d budgeted for the future, they just went, ‘Oh, sweet, we’ll just do it now’.”

The program runs until 30 June, 2020 and was not opposed by the Australian Labor Party, making its passage through the Senate highly likely.

Another stimulus will come in the form of the Small Business Cyber Security program, which offers $2100 grants to small businesses to pay half the cost of security assessments conducted by members of the Council of Registered Ethical Security Testers Australia New Zealand (CREST ANZ). $10 million has been set aside for those grants. As a security assessment will often lead to security projects, this measure should create services opportunities for the channel.

The 2019 federal budget also included a $525 million fund to develop in-demand skills, but that plan only mentioned telecommunications workers rather than the wider IT community.

The government also has a policy to spend $3 million on “establishment of a non-government organisation to build and enhance small business digital capacity” and another $3.4 million to “encourage more women into science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) education and careers.”