One of the worst aspects of Australian business is its default to rent-seeking in the face of any adversity. Look at the car companies and their blackmail for h

One of the worst aspects of Australian business is its default to rent-seeking in the face of any adversity. Look at the car companies and their blackmail for handouts over the last decade. Look at Alan Joyce's recent attempt to get a government debt guarantee for Qantas. This attitude infects start-ups in this country too, though this article isn't too bad. The demand for special tax treatment of start-up investors is regularly made, and the demands for government grants is equally regularly made. Neither of these should be considered - the first from a position of mutual obligation, where those investors who profit from startups need to contribute to the society that makes those start-ups possible. The demand for funding is best looked at by seeing what actually has been funded by Commercialisation Australia grants, and - to put it politely - there's not a lot of stuff there that is "commercial". Instead, there's a museum of half-baked ideas that were able to cobble together a business plan sophisticated enough to fool bureaucrats. My favourite, from memory, was one for several hundred thousand dollars to develop software to help manage car washes. Car washes! (And by the way, the funding scene in Australia is vastly different from what it was 5 years ago - seed capital is very much available from private investors, even if subsequent round VC money is still a far harder boat to catch)