HIGH FLYERS THINK TANK
National Research Priorities Strategic Forum
The Shine Dome, Canberra, 26-27 June 2002
Developing national research priorities
by Joanne Daly
Joanne Daly is Branch Head of the Science Division, Commonwealth Department of Education, Science and Training and heads the Taskforce that is assisting Government to set national research priorities, in consultation with the research and wider community. She is on secondment from CSIRO Entomology where she was a senior principal research scientist. Her research interest is evolutionary biology.
I would firstly like to thank the Academy for hosting this session for the next day and a half. It has been enormously helpful to our process that the four Academies have been actively engaged in this process right from the start – and I am very heartily glad also that it is all four Academies, by the way, not just the SET ones.
I realised when Michael Barber was talking at the Press Club that I would bring you back down to earth with a fairly mundane and rather process-driven talk – perhaps in my Public Service mould, I don't know. But Michael gave an excellent overview of the priorities process and set a number of issues around vision, and excited us, I think, with a number of ideas about the sorts of things we would need to think about in choosing priorities.
I thought it would be useful to reflect on the public consultations that have just gone on. The Taskforce that I head up is actually in the background in this consultation process; our role is to help the Consultative Panel go out and listen to views. And so I thought it would be useful for me, as head of the Taskforce, to reflect on how I thought the consultative process went – what were the things that I liked about it but also what were the gaps that came through in that process. Perhaps during this next day and a half we could try to fill some of those gaps.
I just want to cover three brief topics: Why set priorities? I just want to set the scene on that; secondly, to think about the process that is going on at present; and, thirdly, to reflect briefly on some of the gaps.
Some of the Consultative Panel will actually recognise some of these slides. In many ways, it seemed that setting priorities has come out of the Backing Australia's Ability initiative of the government which was launched at the beginning of last year. But I would say that in fact the priority process began well before that. Certainly the government articulated through BAA that it wanted to ensure that the new money that it was investing was in areas in which Australia enjoys or wants to build a competitive advantage, and certainly the BAA initiative was around innovation, and so this is a very appropriate vision that initiative had.
However, this country has been thinking about national research priorities for some time, not necessarily using that title. In 1996 we had the ASTEC report on priorities; we had John Stocker's report on priority matters – I think it was in 1997; we had Robin Batterham's paper 'Chance for Change' in 2001, and so on. So the community as a whole, particularly the research community, has been actively thinking about priorities over at least the half-decade.
Broadly, there are two reasons to set priorities. The first is to make sure the research that we do as a country is focused on significant issues, including those that are unique to this country. We need to ensure that whatever research we do – and this is a very broad research base that we have in Australia – we certainly need to make sure that some of that effort is focused on the kinds of needs and opportunities that this country has. We also need to set priorities to ensure that we have critical mass in those areas. There is not much point in our having the classic one man and his dog working on something of major significance.
The priorities process itself is well in train, and many of you are engaged in this process. I didn't want to go too much into the background; you have already been inundated, I think, with that to date. Here is the sort of timetable. It is very tight, but I would reflect that, as I said, we have been thinking about these sorts of issues as a nation for over half a decade. The Issues Paper was released at the end of May and we have just completed the public consultation phase. The submissions on the proposed process are due in this Friday. Also, if you have an indication of the kinds of priority areas that you would to see up, we would like you to put them into those submissions. You don't have to give us detailed justification at this stage, but it would be helpful to us to get a sense of where you are coming from on priority issues.
In late July the government will release its agreed approach to setting priorities. These will be announced, I think, in very late July or perhaps early August. The written submissions, in which you were asked to nominate your priorities, will be due in on 9 August. Clearly, if there was a delay in releasing that agreed approach, this date would also shift. We anticipate at this stage that government will announce the priorities publicly in about October, and then in the ensuing months the agencies and funding bodies affected by those priorities would start to develop their implementation plans.
What are the expectations of these priorities? The first and most important that we see is that these priorities should be able to engage the broader community. Some of these priorities should come out of the broader community and they certainly should be identifiable by the broader community. They should be aspirational – I have to say it is a funny word in some ways; it always reminds me of 'asthma' or something like that – that is, the priorities should be able to inspire people as something that we really want to work towards. And the priorities should be able to deliver significant benefits to Australia. These benefits might be economic, they might be social or they might be environmental, but the benefits must be significant to be called a national research priority.
The key elements of the process are that this year we will consider priorities for all areas of research. This certainly was one area, I think, causing confusion in some of our consultations. The Issues Paper does say that the thematic priorities, by their nature, are broad. However, the process of implementation this year will only be for science, engineering and technology. The process will be fully extended to social sciences and humanities next year, meaning there will be a second opportunity to extend the choosing of priorities to those which are more social science and humanities focused, but also the implementation will occur for those two broad areas next year.
Also, the process builds on existing priority setting. It is not meant to replace any of the priority setting going on. In fact, this priority setting process will only work in a country which has robust priority setting mechanisms well and truly in place. So in fact we are building on those processes and providing an overarching framework for all the current priority setting processes.
A very key element is that the priority process should lead to greater coordination and collaboration across institutions and sectors. This is not about setting priorities for CSIRO, Geoscience Australia, the ARC. This is about setting priorities across all those bodies, across the whole of government. As Michael so eloquently said in his Press Club Address at lunch time today, in some cases all that might be required is far greater cooperation and collaboration across existing institutions, rather than a shift in resources.
My first point here is somewhat controversial and I got quite a lot of feedback about this in the consultation process. The government intends this process to be budget neutral. That is, its R&D budget is $5.1 billion next year, and this process is intended to fit within that budget. It is not like the ARC process, where there were additional resources put into priority areas. So the priorities will be set within the current budgetary context. Government also intends to nominate a small number of priorities. This is not intended to prioritise the bulk of research in Australia, but it is to provide some inspirational goals for that research.
The implementation, as Michael said, is by reporting back – in fact, his preferred approach – which also happens to coincide with the government's preferred approach. The fact is, government is not going to get out with a big stick and say, 'You will do this, this and this, and you have got to allocate that much money.' It will say to the agencies and the funding bodies, 'These are our priorities. How can we best, as a nation, respond to those? What can we do to reach those goals?'
The proposed process is to identify the broad thematic priorities which are aspirational, and then to identify under those broad themes some research activity to support the thematic priority. The intention is to come down one layer below the one that Michael was talking about. So Healthy, wealthy and wise, in itself, is not sufficient articulation of national research priorities. We would need to come down one level to say what it is we need to do as a country in order to achieve being healthy, wealthy and wise.
Let's briefly turn to some of the gaps that I saw, as the head of the Taskforce, in the public consultation and that we need to think about. First was the lack of focus on selection criteria that will be used to select priorities, the second is feedback on a model for the social sciences and humanities, and third is implementation plans. I would say this: recognising these gaps in no way is an indication of problems we had in the consultation phase. I was in many ways astounded by how well the consultation was received publicly. I had actually expected a much more hostile audience, and I was fearful that our Consultative Panel would be sitting out the front and having tomatoes thrown at them! But I think Graham Farquhar will probably reflect that by and large the audiences were very receptive and very welcoming.
This is rather a bread-and-butter issue, but on page 8 of the Issues Paper, is an articulation of the selection criteria that will be used by the expert advisory panel to shortlist the nominations for national research priorities. They fill almost the whole page. It is worth looking at those criteria, because unless they change after we get all the feedback by Friday these will be the selection criteria that will be used. These are the major headings that they fall under: priorities will have to be in areas where government in research will have significant impact; priorities will have to be in areas where Australia can build the capacity to do the work, including having the infrastructure, and also must take into account the work that is going on internationally; and, thirdly, Australia must be able to capture the benefits of the research that is done.
The question I would pose to you to think about is whether these selection criteria on page 8 are the right ones. Can they be refined at all? Will they be able to discriminate between the various options of research priorities? When we solicit your final nominations for priorities, by August, it is against these selection criteria that you must address your priorities. Otherwise the advisory committee will not be able to use the input that you give us. We have had some very useful suggestions out and about in the consultation phase, but I think that by and large, in the comments from the floor, people were not addressing these selection criteria as much as I think would have been useful.
Social sciences and humanities feedback. I will let Graham Farquhar talk about how often social sciences and humanities involvement in this process came up, but what worried me as head of the Taskforce is that we have set in train a process for identifying thematic priorities this year and we said we will revisit this next year with social sciences and humanities, and this year we were looking for feedback as to whether this was the right way to go, but we actually got no comment about the appropriateness of the process for social sciences and humanities. Maybe it is okay, but it is just interesting that this process at present is headed by the Minister for Science, the committee is chaired by the Chief Scientist, and the Panel that did the public consultations has a strong SET background. So I posed to the humanities and social science people in the audience, 'Is this okay? Is this the right sort of committee for you to think about, setting priorities which have a much stronger social science and humanities focus?' If it is, that's fine. It may be irrelevant about these people's backgrounds, because these people are distinguished Australians who can think very broadly, but if there is a better way of doing it, we need to hear that. And even if you can't get a submission in by Friday, we need to hear it anyway a bit further down the track.
Lastly, implementation. When people started to talk about implementation in the consultative phase, they actually were talking more, I think, about implementing the results of the priority research, whereas what we particularly need some feedback on is how to implement it this year and the next year – how do you get the research agencies and competitive funding grants to take up priorities or respond to priorities? We really do need to think about these sorts of issues, and we really do need some input from the broader community.
We need to think about the options to shift resources. How can we respond? Is it that the ARC and NHMRC could jointly fund activities? Is it that CSIRO and the ARC could jointly fund activities? What about the timing issues? And how can the national research priorities be integrated into existing processes? These are the sorts of issues we will look for continuing input on.
In conclusion, the process is well under way with the setting of national research priorities and, I think, is receiving a reasonable level of acceptance in the broader community, including the research community. However, we are looking for further input on a range of matters, including the selection criteria, the process for social science and humanities, and implementation.
