The clash over the NBN highlighted one of the major differences in the two parties' innovation plans, even if both are now effectively bipartisan on the 2016 Budget's cuts to university funding and a reduction in the research and development tax incentive, which by 2017 will chew up $3.5 billion of Australia's $10 billion annual research budget.

Labor's plan leans toward outer metropolitan and regional areas, with Husic repeating his party's $16 million commitment to establish up to 20 new incubators and accelerators outside of major cities over three years.

The Coalition meanwhile has placed no geographical conditions on the $23 million it has pledged to startup accelerators both new and existing.

Perhaps understandably given his portfolio, Taylor was city-centric in talking about the potential locations for Australia's first great innovation cluster, mentioning Macquarie Park and the controversial Bays Precinct in Sydney, Fisherman's Bend in Melbourne, Fortitude Valley in Brisbane and Bayswater in Perth (to be fair he's previously talked up health and education clusters closer to his Sydney-fringe seat of Hume).

TechSydney CEO Dean McEvoy is pleased to see the creation of innovation clusters on both parties' agenda. Supplied

He also repeated his support for British-style "city deals" - essentially a collaboration between all three levels of government on a specific project - to spur such clusters.

Husic, meanwhile, talked of the challenges faced by the Hunter Valley tree-changers behind a born-global sports scoring network called StatsOne, who were continually forced into the Maitland town centre to get the upload speeds their startup requires.

"Two-thirds of Australia's startups come out of Sydney today, and while as a Sydneysider I think that's great, it's a system weakness," he said, adding that it invited the blowout in business costs now plaguing Silicon Valley.


"That's why our NBN policy gives outer-metro and regional areas a bigger investment in broadband than what they would have had," Husic continued. That made him more explicit about the areas set to benefit from Labor's promised 2 million extra fibre-to-the-premises connections than the Party's own policy document.

Even though he disagreed with Labor's policy of pursuing clusters outside the major cities, the chief executive of new Sydney tech lobby TechSydney, Dean McEvoy, was glad that innovation clusters were on the agenda.

"The density of startups around Palo Alto or San Francisco can never happen organically in a country the size of Australia, so we have to create it," McEvoy told The Australian Financial Review after the debate.

"It needs to be a big complex with anchor tenants like Atlassian, Google, Uber, so that everyone wants to be there. You need to be able to swivel around in your chair and complain you don't know what to do about your Facebook marketing, and have enough people hear it you get a suggestion of someone else in the building to talk to."

Taylor and Husic were in agreement for much of the debate, with both acknowledging that peak body StartupAUS's Crossroads report inspired their innovation policies in areas like tax breaks for angel investment in growth startups, matched funding for accelerators, moves toward 'entrepreneur visas' and more STEM education.

However the failure of crowdsourced equity funding laws to have passed Parliament was another contentious point at the debate.

The Coalition had failed to act for 18 months after a Labor-commissioned report provided a framework for retail investors to buy shares in startups, Husic said.

"And then they produce legislation which will keep 99 per cent of startups from retail investors, because the bureaucrats fail to see that crowdfunding has disrupted the Corporations Law so they still insist on participants being public companies."

Taylor replied it was not so simple to create a carve-out from Corporations Law, but that the Coalition would provide one if re-elected.

"We're working on allowing proprietary companies to crowdsource equity funding. But in the meantime we think its better to get started, and then build."