HIGH FLYERS THINK TANK
National Research Priorities Strategic Forum
The Shine Dome, Canberra, 26-27 June 2002
Broad-ranging discussion
Tony Underwood: I wanted to respond to your question about whether there are other areas. It seems to me there are probably many others. I can only speak about one about which I have any knowledge. Australia is about the only place in the world that under one political and legal system has environments ranging from tropical to Antarctic. Therefore, things we do in the natural environment, under any of the headings that you have used or that might emerge out of this process, are actually a drawcard for solving many of the problems in the Third World and, indeed, in the developed world, where comparative research across those environments is not actually possible. So I think that is an answer. I think there are many others, but that is one immediate, off the top of my head. That is something we have, and we have it uniquely.
I would like to ask a question, though. In developing themes and having your three major issues that have dominated much of the thinking and the responses, it seems to me equally important to try and link across them in various ways. I know you are trying to do that, but that strikes me as being absolutely crucial. My question is this: we keep hearing about the example of putting a man on the Moon, but it seems to me a much more cogent one is the Human Genome Project, which obviously caught the imagination of some people, including Clinton. It does seem to me that we want to find out why exactly that took the imagination of so many people. And so in terms of Sustainability of environments – again trying to restrict myself to things I understand – I don't think that is something people as such will respond to. But if we can come up with a much better umbrella name – and I don't propose that any one we think up now will work – we can catch all those thoughts, and all the things Graham Harris talked about, in a program which must already have huge popular appeal, because there are so many things going on already that people have signed up to, about preserving natural environments. And so an 'Australian biome' program would actually catch people in the same way a human genome one would, and I would urge you to think about why that was such a successful program and how we can use the human interactions with the naming of programs and the way they are sold to try and get more popular support for these arguments.
Sue Richardson: I would like to make three points. The first one is very quick. It was raised last night and I think it is a very important point – which wasn't captured in your admirable list. If you are setting a research agenda you want something that sounds more like a target than saying Population, ageing and health/Mental and physical wellbeing. You need something like Depression levels will be no more than X, or that only 3 per cent of people over the age of 65 will have hip fractures, or something like that. I think that gives a much more concrete feel to it that makes it much more possible for the taxpayer to get a vision of what is being proposed here, and therefore to be able to sign on to it as something worth spending a lot of money on.
The second point: Joanne Daly asked us yesterday whether we – here I am talking with a social sciences hat on – minded if the current group that is running the research priorities setting process at the moment was to do it also when the agenda was more firmly focused on humanities and social sciences. My answer is yes, I would mind. I am sure that the people who are currently doing it are perfectly wonderful and highly intelligent and informed people in their spheres, but I just want to draw a very quick analogy. Suppose that we were invited to set a research agenda for science for Australia, broadly interpreted, and this initiative came from the Minister for the Arts and it was headed up by the chair of the Australia Council, and the relevant committee comprised a lawyer, an anthropologist, an historian and a linguist, and Michael Barber. Suppose you asked the scientists was this the right group to set a research agenda for science. I am sure you would have said, 'No, that's not quite right. The balance isn't quite right.' Well, that is an absolute direct analogy, as far as I am concerned, in terms of dealing with issues in the humanities and the social sciences. So I would firmly urge whoever are the responsible persons to rethink the composition of the group that might be doing this again next year. It doesn't need to be a complete change, but at least some rebalancing.
The third point that I want to make is to suggest what I would want to put on a research agenda to drive some of the important research in Australia in the next 10 years. Population, ageing and health, Wealth generation, Environmental sustainability are all excellent topics. They can be approached both as bench science and as social science, and I think they probably ought to be approached in both of those ways. But I would also like to raise a different perspective on it. Australia has done wonderfully well, actually, at generating wealth. We have had an economy which has been a star performer in terms of generating GDP per capita over the last 10 years. It has done much better than the United States – and I wish people would stop using the United States as an exemplar of how one ought to do things. Australia is the exemplar of how we ought to do things, if you are looking for economic growth.
What I think we have failed to do, quite spectacularly in many ways, is to convert that material prosperity into genuine human flourishing and to share it widely across the society. Science, together with other forms of change that are being thrust upon our economy, is extremely dislocating and disruptive for many individuals and groups, and there is a great deal of dislocation and suffering going on in sizeable proportions of the population. If you have a look at a whole range of indicators of human wellbeing, you see that we have actually been going backwards in the society at the same time as GDP per capita has been rising. Inequality is one of them – real concentrations of poverty and alienation and exclusion from the society that we are creating have been happening. But there are much more specific indicators, like the violence, the anger, the drug and other forms of addiction that have been increasing. Obesity is, if you like, a social pathology that is an indicator of unhappiness and ill-being, more broadly. There are all sorts of indicators within children saying that we are doing worse than we have in earlier generations. What is going on here? I think that there is a major research agenda called for, to ask: how do we do better in converting our mastery of the material world into the requirements for genuine human flourishing?
Michael Barber: I would like to pick up two comments and then pose a question which Robin might like to reflect upon and answer. I made a reference at the dinner last night, when I introduced Peter McGauran, to Tony Blair's speech 'Science Matters'. I think in the context of Sue's comments, if you have not read Blair's recent speech to the Royal Society I encourage you to do so. In one sense my reaction as a scientist is to basically say, 'Well yes, there are very important issues, but in fact those are issues for the wider community et cetera to engage and resolve those important questions.' Blair I think argues that case very effectively, that balance of how, in a science-literate society, we actually do tackle some of those very fundamental issues.
My first, more specific question, was to what extent, Robin, in setting these priorities, your assessment is that the priorities ought to be quantifiable goals. That, I suppose, is one of the reasons why I put 20 Nobel Laureates by 2025 – not that I would necessarily argue that way, but it is a quantifiable single catch, to which even if one had only got some distance towards them in 15 years' time, one could look back and say, 'Well, we've only got three, but there are these great things that have come.' It seems to me that, in part, in this exercise we ought to be not just stretching the research community but, in a sense, stretching Australia, and probably, if I want to be honest, creating a sense where the achievement will become a political imperative – the failure to achieve it will be a political thing such that both sides of politics will in fact decide they need to do something about it. And lo behold, the research community, whether they are scientists or in the social sciences, are sitting there almost being begged to come on board to solve this political problem. That to me would be a wonderful outcome if we could orchestrate that view. But, Robin, you might like to specifically think about that question of targets.
Jan Thomas (FASTS and the Australian Mathematics Society): I have got a few concerns about the process and the discussion. There are a whole lot of things we are not talking about. The research community has to link in with other than business and profit. It's got to link in more with society, and I think some of the things that Sue was saying I've got some sympathy with – not with all of them, but particularly the economic, the digital divide that we are generating in this country, which is getting worse.
I am currently reading a book called Radical Equations, which is not about mathematics but actually about mathematical literacy. It is written by somebody who was involved in the civil rights movement in Mississippi in the early '60s and is now back in Mississippi doing algebra projects, because he sees that as the new civil rights issue. Now, we have got that problem with access to mathematics in this country. We can set these research agendas but I still believe mathematics is crucial to a lot of our science. We have lost so many of our top mathematicians that there is little left in the university sector, it is weakened in CSIRO, and we are failing to deliver it to our young people so that they can then participate in the priorities that we are trying to set here.
The other point I would like to raise is that among the group of people – and I include myself – who are sitting around talking about these priorities, too many of us are about to retire and there are not enough of the 25-, 30-year-old, PhD, postdoc people involved in this, who are actually going to have to be the ones who carry these priorities forward. A couple of years ago we had a conference, Women Achieving in Science (there will be another one at the end of this year) and we had a very large number of young women scientists come to that forum. There were real issues, not just about child care and how you balance it, but it was quite clear that women in particular felt that they didn't have security in their positions – too many of them on contract positions, short term. Now, that has got worse in the last two years. So we are setting priorities in some sort of vacuum that does not address some of the key issues about how we then actually go forward with these priorities. Or that is my personal feeling.
Martin Dwyer (Institution of Engineers): We absolutely agree we have to set research priorities. Unfortunately, Australia can't be best at everything. Indeed, in our publication which you have been kind enough, Michael, to quote a couple of times, we have suggested some priorities. Underlying those areas of research, there exist competence and quality, there are issues of sustainability, there is the national exposure to risk if we don't get involved, because these are enabling technologies for the economy in years to come.
What we must also do is to ensure, as we roll out these research priorities, that there is integration, there is cross-portfolio cooperation between education, science and industry policy. We need the citations to turn into patents, and we need the patents to turn into commercialisation. And we will have failed unless we do that. So there is no point in just having research priorities without integration.
I think also that setting priorities should not be seen as an excuse to lower the government or business expenditure on R&D, and I note our less than flattering performance on business expenditure on R&D. I think we have got to be very careful that we do not have one sector of the R&D and commercialisation juggernaut being winners at the expense of the whole system working.
Michael Barber: I think yesterday I said something in my Press Club address that integrating the research priorities with industry policy, and the way that was sustainable, was particularly important. Graham Harris, I think, said it more succinctly and more to the point when he charged the Chief Scientist to go forth and slay the demons in Treasury and elsewhere – although I'm not sure, Graham, that you were right that we have to get 80 per cent. I suspect that on what we are doing, probably 95 per cent of other things have to be got right. But it does seem to me, if we are serious about this exercise, that it is not an issue of the research community per se; it is an issue really of that mix through the whole of society. And very much the message from Canada seemed to be that view, that somehow at a very high level that was seen to be something of global good for Canada.
The other point which in fact I was hoping that Bob Watts might actually weigh into, is that Australia is still home to major mineral deposits et cetera, so in that sense our companies are global companies, and that to some extent this exercise seemed to be about ensuring that Australia's research capacities are the first preferred supplier of that R&D capacity to those global companies, both now and in the next 10 to 20 years. That seems to me an important part of building that match that you were alluding to, that all of us in Australia do in fact, in a sense, sign up in a positive way towards that future.
Bob Watts: I hesitated this morning to put in a special case for the minerals/resource industry R&D infrastructure, because I was not here for that purpose. But as I am invited: I really need to do no more, I think, than just point to the fact that this country is the world leader in that area. If you look at industrial consortia, we mentioned AMIRA International – better not forget the 'International' in what I am about to say, because there are two others out there, in Canada and in Britain; the Canadian one is struggling, the British one has struggled, we could almost say, and right now the minerals or the resource industry comes here for its new thinking, its new R&D, its new activities to put into practice.
Unfortunately, it is not glamorous. What is happening at the moment is that there is a move, I think, afoot in South Africa, which again is a country that is very strong in minerals, to support R&D in that area, and of course the emerging one is southern America, particularly Chile. I am concerned, with my Australian hat on, that this country is going to lose a huge amount if it turns its back on what is seen to be oldfashioned sunset industries.
There is a huge amount to do. The one I mentioned, I think over dinner to somebody, is the whole issue of minerals processing in saline water. We don't know how to do it. It is all the water we have got left. All the surfactants need to be redesigned, the whole works. And that is something that this country could do, but I don't know that the will is there, because it is not sexy, we're not splitting genes and all the rest of it. So it is there, it is excellent, but I don't know that it is wanted in a forum such as this.
Denis Wade: I would just like to add a word of caution about being too complacent about how well the economy is doing. I think it is very important that whatever decisions we make about national priority, they do contribute to broadening the base of the economy. So much of this apparent boom we are having at the moment is pretty fragile. A lot depends upon finance and finance services, and tourism. These are all industries that can disappear with either the stroke of a pen or the click of a keyboard.
Tony Peacock: I run the CRC for pest animals – and I am still in my 30s, despite the hair! I was going to put my two bits in. I have complained lately at innovation festivals and things like that about the difficulty of commercialisation out of companies, and I think we really do need to address the issue of how difficult it is. I am a great fan of what is happening in CSIRO, but the fact is it takes well over a year to get a spin-off company that is an absolute no-brainer, no risk thing, through the system. And if you are asking young, enthusiastic people to do that, they really don't want to do it a second time. We really need to get that right. I should add, with our latest spin-off, Michael, that your university approved it within a week, but I have been told I have no hope within seven months of some of my other organisations.
I think there are issues there of national capacity to assess these things or move on. People agree, the researchers are on board with the rhetoric, but it is that middle level that is just bogging people down. It is an extremely frustrating thing when you think you are doing the right thing by the organisation and the country, but you can't get permission to house somebody in an empty office or something on a site.
The second was my personal thoughts on priorities. I haven't seen biosecurity come up at all. One of our great national sources of wealth is our animal and plant industries, and they come up in Agriculture, but our competitive advantage is our relative freedom from disease. And that is worth billions and billions of dollars to us. New emergent diseases have wiped out agricultural industries in other countries. And also when there is a scare on, like foot-and-mouth disease, we can come up with $600 million extra for AQIS people at airports and things like that. It seems to me that there is a huge cost to maintaining our biosecurity, where technology, if we set ourselves a goal of immunising every cloven-hoofed animal against foot-and-mouth disease to remove the risk, that would certainly be less than $600 million. We have the capacity to do those sort of things. So I guess it is a vested interest, but I think it is one of those things, that biosecurity should also feature in some of the discussion.
Michael Barber: Tony, that actually is important. I have been surprised, post-September 11, by the extent to which Australia has been a very silent component in this debate on security, whether it is in the biosecurity or the physical security. If you go to North America, it is very clear that the word is out that the priority is homeland security. The science adviser addressed a Gordon conference not long ago, where he basically said to the universities, 'There'll be no money,' but the agencies are all meant to be developing programs. There has been quite an extensive dialogue between the American Academies, and in fact that includes the social sciences – a major program looking at psychology, both as the reaction to populations and the characterisation of that activity. So it is a little interesting in the Australian context that we haven't seen more of that in the debate and the discussion publicly. I am well aware that things have been going on somewhat behind the scenes, but again for all of us, that picks it through.
I think the other interesting thing was something which I tried to say yesterday, that even if we don't know about what is actually going on in government in these areas – and it is appropriate that we shouldn't, at least those of us that don't have security clearances – it is nevertheless part, in a sense, of our ability as a nation to respond to those activities. I suspect that, as you correctly pointed out, if you wanted to economically cripple Australia by bioterrorism I would go after the agricultural industry rather than the Australian population. So those issues I think ought to be part of this debate, and it is a very delicate issue of quite how we actually put that onto the agenda, because I think post-September 11 that is a big issue for all of us.
Miriam Goodwin (ANSTO): One of the things that has concerned me a lot in the discussion, though, has been that when we have talked about the R&D process, people have stopped at commercialisation and there has really been very little attention paid to the issues of the nation's absorbative capacity. I feel that that is one of the critical things in what Bob Watts has been saying. He has been talking about an industry that has the capacity to absorb the R&D, and that is a critical factor as we go about setting the priorities. If we don't choose priority areas in which we have a national absorbative capacity, then we are going to see a lot of the research benefits move overseas, as people have commented about in other areas where Australia has held a research lead. So that is one of the two points I would like to make.
The other one is just to say, as a person from an organisation that is home to some rather expensive infrastructure, is that we cannot forget the importance of infrastructure in our national competitive advantage, and in our capacity to actually implement the priorities that we set.
Joanne Daly: This is really just a personal observation. I wonder the extent to which ageing does resonate with the broader population. I know it is very much on government's mind, particularly looking at the cost downstream, and it might be on the minds of many of us here as we get to that stage where we start to worry about things falling apart, but I wonder for the wider population if that is true. I don't know the answer. And so I think it is worth thinking about: what is it that the broader community is genuinely worried about? Certainly as a mother of two teenage kids, what I actually am worried about more is that my kids have a future and a job, rather than worrying so much about my own personal ageing.
John Hutchinson (Mathematical Sciences Institute, ANU): I would like to talk a little bit more broadly than just whether or not this particular topic or that particular topic should go into the priority areas. I am glad to see that Michael has made some suggestions which are reasonably broad, but I question whether they are actually broad enough to keep the infrastructure and keep the base of interested and good young people in Australia to meet whatever the priority areas are going to be.
There is a certain instability in selecting one area over another. First of all, we don't know, three or four or five years from now, what are going to be the areas which are going to be appropriate. Secondly, we may not be able to get the people here to work in those areas. Even if the areas covered say 30 or 40 per cent, to pick a figure, of our current endeavour, we are not going to be able to immediately redirect the other 70 per cent of top young scientists into those areas. We run the very real danger that they will go overseas. They are going overseas at an incredible rate, as Jan Thomas's figures are showing, and in mathematics – it is an area I know, but I think this is probably true in other areas – actually the situation is worse than what Jan Thomas's figures show. At the very top, the very best young people, very, very few of them are staying in Australia. If you look at international prizewinners in mathematics, there are quite a few Australians but there are very, very few of them in Australia.
I would point to the Canadian system, which perhaps has a number of inherent advantages over the sort of priority or thematic approach that we are talking about today. I think that for political reasons we need to have a thematic approach, but I would like to also suggest that we move a little bit towards the Canadian system, where you have this system of built-in checks and balances. The players are the universities and the state governments, the federal government and businesses, and if one particular priority area is nominated or one particular area of research is for one reason or another not succeeding – perhaps we don't have the support from the government, perhaps we don't have the support from the universities – it will eventually run down. But if we pursue the system that is unfortunately, to some extent, being pushed here, where we nominate the areas and we stick with them, I think some of them will be fizzers and there won't be an appropriate feedback mechanism built in that will be able to address that as the situation goes along. So I would recommend that people look more closely at the Canadian system.
David Green (Earth Sciences, ANU): I guess in listening and thinking of Australia in its global context, in a saner and wiser and healthier world, then I see Australia continuing to be a materials- and energy-rich society centred in a people-rich region of the globe. I can't see a future in which our continuity as a major quarry, if you like, a major farm, a major forest, a major wilderness are not key parts of our future health and wellbeing and wealth. So the research that underpins a sustainable minerals industry – and that means best practice, from exploration right through to production and processing – a sustainable land use, and, I think, a much greater emphasis on the first stage of materials processing, the use of our energy and an accommodation of our energy resources with our materials wealth, and so new materials research, new materials science is, I think, something that we need to consider more. But I recognise the dilemma there, that the capacity to take up the results of that is something that Australia is perhaps very deficient in.
And then I think that if those are the sorts of visions for part of the research spectrum, then what are the gaps, what are the deficiencies? There are some in the Australian system. One in which we used to lead the world and which we have dropped right out of it is the field that crosses disciplines between earth, biological and chemical sciences – bio-geochemistry. Bob Watts illustrated this when he said that for his particular company, they had gone outside Australia and off to South Africa for their biological processes in mineral extraction. That field, bio-geochemistry, is one that I believe is a real gap, and it is a growing field of research internationally. I think in looking at our priorities, that is one that we indeed need to look at. And there are others like it. That is just one from my experience.
Sue Richardson: I think I didn't make myself clear, when I was suggesting that a research priority might be questions about translating material prosperity into real human wellbeing, that these are eminently researchable topics. These are a proper subject of social science-humanities research programs. This is not a matter just of the political system or of pub discussions or of community capacity-building or whatever, these are subject to and will yield to systematic, high-level, analytical research, in the same way as any bench science will yield to it.
Phil McFadden: I think two of the priorities we really need to look at are Sustainable earth systems and National security. Both of those, of course, come down to a societal need. In terms of the non-societal needs set-up, I think the Canadian model is really very good, where they are funding it effectively and they will allow the evolutionary process to go through – we all know that evolution is pretty effective and so they are going for the evolutionary process. I think that's great. But in terms of the thematic things, several of them are going to come out as societal need, and they tend not to have the zing of putting a man on the Moon in 10 years' time.
We have edged up against saying this several times today and yesterday, but I think we should articulate it clearly. Putting a man on the Moon was not a scientific problem, it was a politically driven problem, and the fact of the matter is it worked because John Kennedy put his money where his mouth was. If we are going to look at something like Sustainable society in this country, we have got to have a politician stand up and say, 'By the year 2015 we are going to have solved the problems to the point where we are going to be supplying clean water to Adelaide.' It is very difficult for scientists to say that, because we can't articulate the resources, we can't bring everything together. But in order to achieve that takes a tremendous amount of coordination, and I think one of the things we need to do in this exercise is to get a politician somewhere to stand up and articulate precisely what those societal needs are, so we can respond to them.
Dick Davies: I would just like to comment on the process that we are going through, and go back to Lawrence Warner's talk yesterday, which reminded me of the Innovation Summit, when at the dinner I was sitting next to a lady who turned out to be the Professor of Dance at Hong Kong. She complained, 'I came to this summit because I thought it was about innovation, and I find it is all about R&D funding.' The other thing about the Innovation Summit, if you think about it, was that there was very little talk about the media, and yet the one area where Australia has been spectacularly successful in a global sense is the way Rupert Murdoch took a provincial newspaper company from Adelaide and has turned it into a global behemoth. Now, whether we like Murdoch or not is irrelevant. What he has done is actually what we are asking Australian companies to do, and indeed other companies are now going overseas and perhaps trying to do the same sort of thing.
The point I am getting to is that there is a danger that this process will be run along a predetermined agenda, and whether it comes from the Department of Finance or the Department of Industry or wherever, I think we need to be very careful that the process does not get hijacked. I urge the Chief Scientist to take this on board. Personally I found it very refreshing that this whole exercise has been organised through DEST, because in fact we have got a different community and we are hearing different views – and I am sure there is a whole heap of other views out there that haven't been taken into consideration.
So for those of us who are outside of the political system, perhaps we can bring pressure to bear to ensure that individual departmental agendas don't derail the process.
Janice Burn (Consultative Panel): You have just given me a very good lead-in there, because one of the most noticeable things I have found in the whole process – and perhaps one of the most alarming things – is that there are quite different views about where we should be going and what our priorities should be, depending on the panel. I am not talking about the divide between the humanities and social sciences and the others; I am talking about where we have groups of researchers who are the primary audience and where we have groups where members of the community are actually there. The average member of the community is not going to come up and say Salinity or Sustainability. They are quite definitely going to come up and make statements like Transportation, Equity of access to all services, Safety – a safe Australia. They are making comments about how their daily lives are affected by science, and many of them don't actually see any impact at all.
So one would very much hope that, whatever priorities we come up with, we do actually define within those priorities how it is going to impact on the average Australian, otherwise they will never ever accept that priority as one of their own. And I do think that it is unfortunate that we can't have large groups with those separate communities hearing and listening to each other, because somehow science has got to be made available to the common person and the common good, and that has to be identified. So I would stress that there are very different opinions about what is required in Australia, and it worries me how we can resolve that.
Lawrence Warner: I just wanted to make a few comments. One is on security. Michael, you talked as if there hadn't been any discussion about September 11. I did.
As to the Innovation Summit, just a couple of points of clarification. One is that was quite explicitly badged as an opportunity for the social sciences and the humanities to show how they are players in the new economy. That is why R&D.
An irony is that actually media was promoted, as far as I know. Because I was told by my President to make sure that this is what we really promoted, media is what we promoted. And media is what I nominated yesterday as the Academy of the Humanities number one priority. Murdoch is part of that; he is a big part of it. But there are all sorts of other things that we call the new media – that is where my Attack of the Clones thing came from – but certainly that is part of what, for lack of a better phrase, I will call the new humanities. And frankly, from the Academy's perspective, it is as much directed against the very oldfashioned dry-as-dust humanities paradigm as it is directed against those who would equate innovation with science and engineering, as PMSEIC does and our government does, which is inappropriate.
So again: Languages, New media, we're on board. Or Languages as part of Security. I think that one makes perfect sense. I am glad that Security has finally come up. It clearly is agricultural, political, linguistic and so forth.
Paul Drake (DEST): I thought it was interesting what Professor Pettigrew said about how at the NHMRC they considered national capacity to be that there are capable people with requisite skills. It poses a question about the inadequacy, perhaps, of standard government measures for measuring research capability in terms of dollar amounts. If we are talking about building networks – interdisciplinary, international networks – it is people rather than network terminals that are necessary, it seems to me. So there might be some implications there for the way that we consider the budgetary side of things. I understand the standard government line is to say, 'Well, we threw X hundred million dollars at the problem. What more do you want?' It might be that we want more people, say 100 people. What is significant, for example, about this forum is that 100 people have come together to discuss the issues, not that it cost whatever it cost. Without the coming together of these people, there will be no spin-offs across all the various disciplines, no further questioning, no new policies.
