CGT and PROPOSED RDTI CHANGES CREATING UNCERTAINTY IN LIFE SCIENCES Mixed messaging from Government recognising 10 year plus timeframes to take product to market

With
Rebekah Cassidy CEO,
AusBiotech

Professor Michael Valenzuela,
Founder and Chief Scientific Officer
Skin2Neuron

OP-ED SEGMENT
Filmed in Melbourne & Sydney | June 2026

Proposed Budget changes to the Research and Development Tax Incentive (RDTI) will disproportionally impact Australia’s biotech, medtech and health tech sector forcing more home-grown companies to consider moving overseas.

Nine leading health and life sciences organisations: AusBiotech, Pathology Technology Australia, MTPConnect, ANDHealth, Life Sciences Queensland, Life Sciences WA, BioNSW, BioMelbourne Network and ARCS Australia, have co-signed a letter to Treasurer Jim Chalmers asking for an urgent review of RDTI changes proposed in the Federal Budget.

While the sector shares concerns regarding a number of tax changes including to CGT, a proposal to limit the RDTI’s long standing refundable tax offset for companies less than 10 years old is particularly unworkable.

This is because it routinely requires more than a decade to progress life changing and saving health discoveries through rigorous clinical, regulatory and market access pathways.

AusBiotech CEO Rebekah Cassidy said the proposed changes were already creating uncertainty for Australian companies who are making long range decisions about where they should undertake clinical development programs.

“The long timeframes required to translate and develop medical research into health products for patients are not new news.  It is well understood by industry and government that bringing these critical health products to market routinely takes well beyond a decade,” Ms Cassidy said.

“Companies in our sector spend years dedicated to the development of new medical products that help people in Australia and around the world.

“They bridge multiple commercial ‘valleys of death’ as they spin out of research into pre-clinical development, clinical trials, regulatory approval and manufacturing scale-up before revenue generation through market access is even possible.”

“Cumulatively, biotechnology has been Australia’s largest value-add export industry outside primary industries since 2016 and it supports more than 350,000 jobs across almost 3,000 organisations.

“AusBiotech has been engaging at the highest levels of the Australian Government and across the parliament since the changes were announced.

“We want to work with the Government to get these policy settings right and at speed so we can give Australia’s biotech, medtech and health tech companies the policy certainty they need to continue to thrive. We just need Government to meet us at the table.” 

Source: AusBiotech media release (June 2026)
Credit: Michael Valenzuela, Skin2Neuron as case example