Salinity conference
The Shine Dome, Canberra, 17 October 2003
Welcome, introduction and statement of purpose for the day
Dr Phil McFadden
Phil McFadden
was appointed Geoscience Australia's (GA's) Chief Scientist in 1999. Previously he was a Chief Research Scientist in GA's predecessor the Australian Geological Survey Organisation (AGSO). During his career in GA (and its predecessors AGSO and the Bureau of Mineral Resources, Geology and Geophysics [BMR]) he has held responsibility for the Geophysical Observatories and Mapping Division, for the Geophysics Division, for the Geoscience Computing & Database Branch and for the Geomagnetism and Paleomagnetism Section.
Late in 1980 Phil left his position as Reader in Physics and Director of the Computing Centre, University of Rhodesia and came to a position in Australia at the Research School of Earth Sciences, Australian National University. He joined BMR late in 1983.
Over the years Phil's research interests have spanned paleomagnetism, electronics, geomagnetism, mathematical statistics (mainly of vector data and of interlinked sequences), deep Earth processes, Earth conductivity, airborne magnetics and radiometrics data analysis, and earthquakes. He has published a large number of papers and has co-authored two books.
In 1977 he was awarded the Jubilee Medal of the Geological Society of South Africa. In 1991 he was elected a Fellow of the American Geophysical Union and in 1996 he was elected a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Science.
Welcome. I am Phil McFadden. I am chairing the process here today. I am taking a disinterested and dispassionate view on this; I am a neutral observer, simply trying to facilitate the process. I just wish to stress that I do not have a particular position on this, and the Academies are taking an independent view on it and, in the long run, will provide advice to the minister and the secretariat as to their view as to the veracity and validity of the information that is in the document.
I think this is particularly important today, in terms of what is going to be happening in Australia. We are all very much aware of what a significant problem salinity is in the Australian context. I think most of us are also aware that there has been a large amount of difficulty for people out there who are users of salinity mapping methods, because they recognise that salinity is causing them a significant problem, significant damage to their assets, and yet there is a significant amount of confusion as to what they should be doing in terms of mapping the salinity and in terms of managing the problem.
Secretaries and ministers in government departments, catchment managers and farmers are finding that when they have a problem and they try to get advice as to what they should be doing about it, they get widely divergent opinions, widely divergent advice of what they should be doing, widely divergent techniques that they don't understand, and they don't recognise what the information is going to be giving them. This is damaging the credibility of the science quite significantly – in an area that is truly important to the country.
As an example of how important it is at the moment, we actually have parallel processes running. Right at the moment we have a House of Representatives Standing Committee on Science and Innovation running an Inquiry into Coordination of the Science to Combat the Nation's Salinity Problem. The secretariat for that group are here today.
What are we trying to achieve here today? As a consequence of the confusion and lack of credibility, I think, it has become quite apparent that it is important to have as an outcome of this process a set of documents that will identify for the users out there the kinds of questions they need to ask, and the information they need to get so that they understand the problem and so that they will be able to manage the problem they face. They also need to be able to understand the techniques that are available to them and the costs of those techniques in order to be able to get the information they need to resolve their problems.
That means that we need out of this a set of documents – and Peter Woodgate and Brian Spies have been contracted to write these documents – that will actually be valuable to the people out there who are facing these problems and who are going to have to make these decisions.
Today we are going to have four scientific sessions presented by eight different experts in the area. What I am hoping we will get out of those talks is some education and some illumination on the state of the art in each of those particular areas, followed by, within their talks, some comment on the value, the completeness, the correctness and the balance of the documents as they exist at the moment. We will then open it up to discussion, and again please bear in mind, in your talking, that what we really are trying to do is feed in to the authors information that they need to modify their documents, to come up with this final output.
We are going to have, first of all, Ian Thompson talking to us from the Department of Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry, followed by Sharon Davis, to give us some background on the process as to how we have got to here. We will then be running the scientific sessions, the expert sessions, with discussions at the end of each one of them. Later on in the afternoon, after afternoon tea, we will have the expert panel – in other words, the speakers – up here for an open forum. We will then bring it to a conclusion.
