HIGH FLYERS THINK TANK
National Research Priorities Strategic Forum
The Shine Dome, Canberra, 26-27 June 2002
Session
1 discussion
Session 2 discussion
Session 3 discussion
Session 4 discussion
Session 5 discussion
Session 6 discussion
Session 7 discussion
Session 8 discussion
Session 1 discussion
Chair: Michael Barber
Tony Underwood (University of Sydney): I am not sure if this question is in order for this session or later, so perhaps some advice on that. A question that did come up was to do with the criteria in the policy, the third one of which had the major heading 'Australia must capture the benefits'. I am not entirely clear that we know how to measure whether Australia is capturing the benefits of some forms of research. Is that something that has been on the agenda and been worked out well, or is that something vague? Now, this may come under implementation, so I am quite happy to leave it till then if that is the appropriate time to ask it.
Michael Barber: I think I can make perhaps a ruling which is helpful. I certainly think that is an issue that falls within Joanne's criteria. The more specific issue of getting some broad indicators of that are really the theme that Bruce Hobbs will address tomorrow. But that issue would certainly be one that Joanne or Graham may wish to comment on specifically a little bit as it is seen within this process.
Joanne Daly: The answer is somewhere between being very vague and very specific. The second dot point under the criterion, 'for Australia to capture the benefits of the research', is about expanding the knowledge base and increasing our input into hot science – there are many criteria that can be used, and I think the Academy of Science, for example, put out a report last year looking at the benefits of international collaboration, in which they looked at the citation rates for people who collaborated internationally versus those who did not, and so on. So I think there are some very good criteria that can be used to see if we are having significant impact in those areas and capturing the benefit.
The first dot point under that criterion is capturing the benefits through commercially or socially relevant outcomes. This was an issue that came up a number of times during the consultation phase, and it is basically saying that when we established national research priorities we also need to think about the process by which we would capture the benefits. Sometimes that can be a very direct process, by measuring things like the patent output or by looking at the implementation of a particular policy or regulation, if it is national water policy or something like that. In other cases we are yet probably to define the appropriate outcome measures that we could use. So I think it is a mixture. We already have in place some very well-defined outcome measures, but I think also in this process as it evolves over the years we need to sharpen that. CSIRO might reflect on that in their talk, as I think one of the things that they have been thinking about with their Flagship projects is how to get better outcome measures.
Graham Farquhar: I guess I would like to add to that that Ralph Slatyer made the comment to me earlier this afternoon about the cultural significance of science. We as scientists, when we travel overseas, are the people that overseas people see. So that is one aspect of it.
But science has an important culture, and it seems to me that we can include that among our outcomes. And in putting forward various priorities as proposals, we should be imaginative about scoring ourselves as to how those outcomes would have good social benefits in that kind of cultural sense as well.
Sue Richardson (Academy of the Social Sciences): To be honest, I was surprised that the selection criteria were so vague. While you could not disagree that our research priorities should be significant and capable of implementation, and produce some benefits for Australia, it seems to me that you could scarcely use such vague criteria to discriminate between one set of proposals and another. It is hard to imagine any substantial research project put forward by any scholar in this community that would not meet those criteria. I am just wondering whether I have missed the plot here. Is this actually just code for saying that you have thought at great length as to what is meant by 'significant for Australia' and you just haven't let us in on the secret, or is it really as vague as the criteria that you put up?
For a start I would like to imagine that you would say something like 'the most significant that we are able to devise, given the current Australian research capacity' – that is not just that it is significant, but that it is more significant than anything else that might be competing for a research priority theme. The notion of what is significant and what is not, I would imagine, could occupy this group of people and many others for days, in discussing what you mean by significant. Significant for what? Significant for human well-being? Significant for protection of the environment? Significant for GDP? Significant because it is the creation of new knowledge that is unique and original, and that in itself is a worthy objective of human endeavour? What might significant mean?
Joanne Daly: If I could answer the beginning part of the question: I think it is very important to realise that these selection criteria are not to be used for distinguishing between research projects. National research priorities is not down at project level. It is not even necessarily down at the discipline level, unless there is a discipline that is seriously underdone but is fundamental to the future of Australia. I guess that is why the four priorities were chosen for the ARC last year: the government and the ARC believed there should be significant increase in activity in that area.
These criteria are to be applied at a fairly high level – What are the national goals of this country? Should we be investing as a country in things like energy: reducing greenhouse emissions, and the technology that sits behind that, looking at rural and regional development and the technological advances that are needed in order to reduce the isolation of people in the rural community and to increase their employment possibilities. So we are actually looking at a very high level here, and 'significant' is 'very significant'. And I guess it was in that context we were using the word 'significant'. We did not want to use too many adjectives in front of these words.
I guess the other is that the interpretation of these criteria will be by the expert advisory panel, who I guess we have an opportunity to sit down with. Given that sense, this is a very visionary process. We are not down there choosing between Cuticles of eucalypts versus Working on insecticide resistance in my favourite insect. It is actually right at the top level. Do we as a nation want to invest more money in things like energy or mining or agriculture? If we want to invest in all those areas, are there specific areas we really want to put in a very great boost to? So it is really the interpretation and the context of the whole paper that sets the interpretation of those selection criteria – right up at a high thematic level.
Graham Farquhar: I would like to comment on that question in a different way. There was always this tension in the Consultative Panel meetings: when something was spelled out in great detail – which is an example, I suppose, of transparency that it is there – then it was quite easy for people to say, 'Well, you've actually got it all sorted out. Why are you bothering coming around asking us?' and when there were areas where clearly researchers and research users and the general public were being invited to make suggestions and there were these big gaps, people were saying, 'God, you haven't thought this through at all.' I mean, there is a bit of a balancing act between providing a straw man which people can react to and having something that does come up from below.
Just to speak about process: whenever we would get questions like yours – which is obviously an important one, I am not meaning to belittle it – we would say, 'Get it in writing, and get it in soon.' So I think with your comments, and obviously with your background you have an insight into the dangers of a word that might have so many different meanings to different people, it is important to get those in. 'We will send the web address to you' was the normal retort. If people have got ideas about process, get them in by Friday.
Michael Barber: May I take the chair's prerogative to ask a question. There was a separate tension, it seems to me, between your statement, Joanne, about these things being aspirational, and a three-year horizon, or even the extent that Australia had to rapidly build up the capacity to respond. If you actually take the vision of a man on the Moon, as John Kennedy articulated, by the end of a decade, that flowed through with a lot of agencies doing a lot of things in America, and that was a-lot-of-things-a-long-way-before-a-man-even-walked-on-the-Moon activity. So I would be interested to know to what extent, in the consultative process or in the Taskforce, in a sense resolving that tension between there being something which people can in fact sign up to and – without even getting to Graham's view of blue sky out there – a view at that level that we are not going to have solved salinity, for example, in three years but we can make some step. I was interested in your thoughts on that tension.
Joanne Daly: It was interesting when we looked at the response when this paper we had written went out: if I could delete one phrase out of this entire paper I guess 'three years' would be it. I now realise we didn't actually convey what we wanted to say at that point.
Most of us here work in a research environment, and all of us are used to having reviews of our work. Every one, two, three, five years or whatever it is quite normal to stop and say, as an organisation, as an agency or as a country, 'Are we going in the right direction?' And that is what the three years was really intended to convey. People have said to us that you can't look at outcomes in three years, and I agree that if you are starting the research today, by and large in most areas of research you will not see an outcome of significance in three years. You are looking at five, 10 years. When I was setting up new programs of activity in entomology, I always knew, even if I was putting on a postdoc or starting an activity with two or three years' funding, that I was making a commitment on behalf of CSIRO for up to 10 years or more, because that is the way things panned out, by and large.
The three years is simply triggering saying, 'Look, we actually need to stop and have a look at these things periodically, and see how they're going.' So that's one thing about the three years. And it may be appropriate to bring in a new priority and to start to phase down a priority that is not actually getting us where we want to be.
I think the other thing that is important is that in terms of outcomes there is no point in our setting a priority which will deliver nothing within 10 years, but it doesn't have to be delivering the result, the end point, in 10 years. Aspirational goals are things we aim to get to – 'Let's go to Mars, or to Saturn,' or whatever. So that might be the end point.
The United States believes that nanotechnology will drive its industry in the year 2020, and that is why we also need as a country to get into nano, because it will be a fundamental technology of industry within the next two decades.
So what is the goal? By 2020 we certainly want nanotechnology to diffuse right through our industry. In five years' time it might be appropriate to say we would like to double the number of PhDs in that area, or we would like to see some engineering departments in Australia actually teaching courses specifically around nanotechnology, or have masters degrees in it or something. So you need to set goals, and to recognise that the kinds of outcomes you get in three to five years are of a different nature from those you might get in 10 to 20 years' time but nevertheless you need to set them.
I used to get funding from the Cotton Research and Development Corporation. They knew they were in for the long haul in the sort of research I did, but they also wanted to see me spitting out outcomes every two to three years so that over the lifetime of the research, which was 10 or 15 years, they got continuing benefit from it. And that is what we are looking for here, I think.
The three years is a red rag to a bull, I'm afraid. I think it actually conveyed the wrong message. But we do need to actively review these things.
Graham Farquhar: Just one comment about that: the other thing is that, if science is as dynamic as we all would hope it to be, you would not want to wait 10 years before you looked again to see if there was something else coming up on the horizon, otherwise we would have a pretty dead place.
Leon Mann: Joanne, there were a couple of times when I think you wanted to say 'inspirational' rather than 'aspirational', and I think it reflects the two hats that we wear. As scholars, scientists, whatever, we in fact aspire, we hope, to find new things, to build knowledge. As members of the community we want to be inspired. I think that is the double focus that this consultation process was about, and why the Panel went to the community.
I am wondering whether, though, there is really not only a tension between the way in which researchers and, say, the community at large see this whole exercise, but whether, when we go to implementation, we are going to be able to test whether in fact the community at large buys what we want to do, and whether therefore the set of research priorities that are selected will in fact have to pay very, very close attention to that aspect as well.
Joanne Daly: I guess all I can say is I agree with you. Certainly, how the priorities are actually chosen and how we get buy-in by the broader community is a key part of this. I guess Robin Batterham has a covert agenda in the research priorities exercise – well, it's not that covert, it is fairly overt – that he believes that unless the R&D community can clearly make a case with the taxpayer such that the taxpayer can genuinely believe in their heart of hearts that research delivers benefits to Australia, we will not see a significant increase in R&D expenditure. I think Robin's view, certainly, is that part of this exercise is about us as a research community articulating to the broader community the kinds of goals that we as a group of researchers are really aiming for, to deliver to Australia.
You are right, part of this whole process has to be a communication strategy – it sounds a bit New Age, I guess – actually engaging the broader community in the end point and not just this early consultation phase.
Warwick Anderson (NHMRC): My question is really like this one. I thought aspirational was something to do with people who went to the electorate in Western Sydney or something. But I think inspirational is really a key thing here, and I guess my question is fairly concrete.
Can you give us some idea of the numbers of people who have actually been involved in your consultation, and the mix of them? I know that when NHMRC has been through its consultation about priorities, through Jack Best's committee we have had a couple of thousand people, mainly members of the community. Or has it mainly been us scientists talking amongst ourselves about this? If we are going to do what you said at the end there, Joanne, really getting people behind us and pushing and thinking, 'This is what we really want,' they are the people who are going to have some input somewhere along here and I must say I can't quite see where that is going to happen at the moment.
Graham Farquhar: I will just give a quick response. On the mechanics of the numbers, I think that typically the lowest we ever had was about 40, and more likely, say, 100. As I said, the composition varied a lot. But in terms of the meetings, asking, 'Have we really consulted?' this became quite an issue, I remember, in Sydney because there was a father of two teenagers there who sat through the first part and said, 'Look, I've come here because I'm interested in my son's future. I don't understand what you're talking about.' It is because we were talking about the process part and he didn't feel he heard the vision.
There and in several other places we actually had people who said, 'Well, you need to make a priority about how you consult the community and how you set priorities,' because that process itself, which is much more at the heart of the social sciences and the humanities in their disciplines, is a big question.
Joanne Daly: It was actually quite interesting, because the audiences did vary enormously from area to area. In a couple of the locations where we did get predominantly the local university, I think that the feedback from the committees was that they were fairly flat meetings, by and large, with a fairly narrow set of priorities. And not even representative of what that university specialised in, I would have to say.
One of the best ones that I was at was the one in Darwin, which was actually the smallest. It must have been about 30. But it was a very mixed group of people, with strong representation from the NT government, who had actually already prepared their submission to come in, they had a whole-of-NT-government approach. The Menzies School of Medical Research was there, and other members of the local community. So where we got a broad spread of people, not only within the research community but also from industry and others, the feedback was really much better.
I think the reality is that what we saw was not a random cross-section of the community, nor did we ever go out pretending that we would get that, I would have to say. The process would take a lot longer and we would probably never get to the end point if we did. To some extent I guess the community has many different ways they can input into these processes, so we are looking for, at times, peak bodies or other bodies to actually give us some sort of broader sense of what the priorities should be.
Chris Fell did do the taxi driver test diligently, I think, and we were quite interested that the priorities that the taxi drivers were coming up with were not that different from the priorities that were coming up from the research community.
Brian Embleton (CRC for Satellite Systems): I am not sure whether I was being unconsciously goaded into making comment here, after listening to the number of references to Mars, the Moon et cetera. But there is one thing that that program did inspire. I could speak for ages on this subject, as Joanne probably knows. That was a decade project. Don't expect results from these kinds of objectives within a decade. And one thing it did do was to inspire a nation. It inspired a generation of youth – 10-year-old kids at the beginning of that exercise were people working in the business at the end of it – and that is sustained today. These are the kinds of objectives and outcomes I think we should be seeking. They are the performance measures, and I think they are what should drive this whole exercise.
Michael Barber: We need a Sputnik event, I think. I think that probably augurs well for the rest of our activities, with the spirited and constructive interchange. I certainly have a whole slew of other questions that I would love to have posed to Joanne and Graham, and there will be opportunities, I am sure, for some of those to come in. I think all of you should take up Joanne's comments to send constructive suggestions in by the end of the week.
Session 2 discussion
Chair: Michael Barber
Michael Barber: I wondered if I could take a chairman's prerogative to ask a question which might come back to one of the issues that Joanne also addressed. There has been a temptation in this to focus on the idea that priority is about money. But if you actually read the words in the document very carefully you see that the words are in fact 'where there is whole-of-government action', which I think Joanne says in her own abstract could involve action on collaboration or other aspects.
It does seem to me there is a question then to ask of the humanities and the social sciences, even within the restrictive framework of this phase 1 of the exercise. What would be the changes that might be imposed, short of money, in the way that agencies operate that actually could bring together, not as what you described as a handmaiden to the scientists but in fact to generate the sort of embracive, multidisciplinary – to use that somewhat hackneyed expression – expertise necessary to deliver the outcomes? I think that is an issue that we really need to have on the agenda, because again I think that part of our structures could be changed as part of this priority to get the outcome, and that could be, in my reading of it, a perfectly legitimate whole-of-government response. I think that is an important part of the debate. I don't know whether you have got any thoughts to address that, particularly maybe feeding back to the sort of process outcomes that Joanne was talking about.
Lawrence Warner: I will just say very generally that what I was trying to get at in my talk was that we need to move beyond certain comfortable modes of compartments, whether they be among the disciplines or for who can participate in the priority setting exercise, or the whole-of-government. There is no question about that. And so you are right that it does go well beyond the issue of money. What we would urge the government to do, or the kinds of groups that we will be working with, would be to move beyond that kind of compartmentalisation.
By the same token, one thing that the Council of the Academy of the Humanities has been trying to do is to urge humanities scholars to get out of their silos and to see ways in which their research can work well with the whole-of-government, rather than just becoming chummy with the humanities part of the ARC. There is no question that it goes both ways.
Leon Mann: If I could add: I think there are at least three or four things that could be done. One is, I think, that the ARC would be looking at panels which in fact are multidisciplinary and which are set up as the national research priorities are established so that they are there. You would not define them as being essentially, 'Well, these are SET panels,' but they would be right across. It would give an opportunity, I would say, for other disciplinary areas to actually come out with what might be very surprising and highly innovative suggestions and solutions. I would say that that is part of a structure.
You would be looking, I would say, across agencies for joint committees which would address the way in which the agencies would collaborate. I assume that would happen.
I would think that at the next phase of this whole initiative, when the expert committee takes over from the Consultative Panel and sifts through the proposals that are there and makes some sense out of them, looking perhaps to how you can patch some of them together and how you can talk about, 'This might build on that, and this works well with that,' et cetera et cetera, there is a very important need to ensure that membership of that expert panel does include representation from social sciences and humanities. (Lawrence, again, has picked up the fact that there was no-one from humanities on the Consultative Panel.) Even though they might not have the expertise to be able to address some of the novel scientific and technological issues that are coming forward, they ought at least to be able to offer a contribution or an observation, and perhaps even, surprisingly, be able to say things which in fact enrich or talk about how in future, as it is rolled out increasingly right across all of knowledge, the other disciplines will come into the picture. So I think that structurally would be very, very important.
And it seems to me there are lots of opportunities for what I think is called a think tank. Think tanks in this country typically are political. They are small – it is one person and a dog – and they have got a political agenda. But I think we lack in this country the concept of a think tank which is very, very common, say, in the United States, in which you have groups of scholars, interested people, who come together and there is a continuing colloquium. It would be just marvellous if, once these national research priorities are established, there is here in Canberra, over summer, a bunch of think tanks going nonstop and really hammering away, in which people from all disciplines can have a go and lay out some ideas.
Paul Rossiter (Curtin University of Technology): I am probably being a bit thick but I am finding it very difficult to understand the committee's response on this particular issue, the integration of all of the disciplines. It seems to me that the feedback from every review committee has been that, if we are thinking at the very high thematic level, separating SET from the other areas is a nonsense. We have heard from the three learned Academies that separating them out is a nonsense.
Joanne Daly: Well, what we can do is we will give that feedback, but ultimately the decision has to be made by government as to how it wants to respond to that. But I think that the feedback is very clear.
Sue Serjeantson (Australian Academy of Science): I raise this question in the humanities and social sciences section because I am not sure where else to raise it.
It seems to me that so far we have seen a fairly parochial framework for setting priorities, and also we seem to have forgotten our history of setting priorities. Seventy-five years ago we had the vision to set up CSIRO. Fifty years ago, in the postwar reconstruction period, we set up the Institute of Advanced Studies. It is very salutary to look at the priorities that drove those people such as Nugget Coombs and John Dedman in that period. First of all, they realised that we had been at war with a people that we knew nothing about, whose language we did not understand, whose behaviour and human geography we knew nothing about. And we set up the Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies. It wasn't science, it was the Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies. We recognised that in the postwar reconstruction period we needed to concentrate on the social sciences in Australia, and we set up, in the Research School of Social Sciences, the world's first Department of Demography. We also recognised that we had to be internationally competitive, and we set up the John Curtin School of Medical Research, where we had medical research undertaken at internationally competitive levels, as evidenced by a Nobel Laureate, in John Eccles, as early as 1963. And then we had the Research School of Physical Sciences and Engineering because we were terrified of nuclear energy, and we are still doing fusion research in that school.
Where I think the humanities could really contribute to this debate is by articulating Australia's history of priority setting and where it has got us. Joanne said we have been thinking about it for half a decade and so we are okay. We have been doing it all the time, and every individual researcher, whether in science or in humanities or in social sciences, knows that every day you are setting your own research priorities, because you are keeping tabs on what everyone else in the entire world is doing.
So first of all I would like to say to the humanities, 'Please, in your submission, how about thinking about getting your historians together and articulating where we have been as a nation.' That will help us work out where we are going. And part of that will involve looking at how we have forged partnerships in the past, CSIRO and John Curtin: CSIRO brought the entomologists together with the virologists in John Curtin and we got rid of something that we wanted to – we got rid of the rabbits, with myxomatosis. We have a proud record of research priority setting and partnerships, and I just think we are forgetting it all in this very narrow, parochial framework that we are working in at the moment.
Jack Best (NHMRC): On the committee I chair, the deputy chair is the Dean of Social Science, which has helped provide some civilisation within the NHMRC in terms of the fact that she really has brought to bear the whole question that you have got to interlink basic through to clinical through to population health, through to health services and, may I say, policy research. I think that in the area that you mentioned, Professor Mann, in terms of the impact, it is very important to put that socio-economic, legal et cetera, or whatever parts of the Academy you want, onto the four essentially technological priorities that have been put forward.
Of course, we get into the technological area just as much. I am mindful of the fact that when Carthage fell they only left technological mandates. We haven't actually embraced their literature over the last 2,000 years, unlike Rome and Greece. Which then leads me to what Dr Warner was saying about language. One of the things which has always intrigued me is the fact that, rather than getting the Old Norse, we have actually got a language of health which has grown up within our community, a distinct language, just like sign language became a distinct language. It is very interesting to know whether in fact research into this language would yield some knowledge about the asymmetry of information which is available in this whole area.
I agree with you, it is very difficult when you get the two cultures separated. I think that the priority that you put, Professor Mann, and the strategic position that you are in, is that you can certainly emphasise the fact that we have got to come together and look at those linkages very early, because I would hate to see that separation.
I suppose the question is: would you like to comment?
Lawrence Warner: I agree with what you are saying. On the issue of languages, I think what you say picks up very well on what Sue was saying, which was elaborating upon one of my major points. That is, we are engaged here in a cultural enterprise, and cultures are what the humanities are about. We are fooling ourselves if we decide that the humanities are about a dusty book that you put on the shelf – or simply entertainment. Obviously, I was having some fun with the Attack of the Clones, but practice in the creative arts is part of research and we need to become aware of that. These are just ways of recognising that, even when we are talking about science and technology, we are not simply leaving behind the humanities. As far as the languages go, that is a very good way to think about languages, of course, and we can talk about all sorts of languages. Each discipline has its own language as well, and that point is well taken. Of course, what we are talking about is French, Indonesian and so forth.
Graham Farquhar: When I said that we said, 'Stop, we don't want to hear any more,' it wasn't that we didn't want to take the message back. What we were saying is that we do understand the message. It is not just that we see you as a handmaiden of SET; we will take the message back. And we certainly are doing so, from both panels.
But having said that, there is the extra issue that we have to do also what the government charged us to do. If we had spent the whole Consultative Panel debating just that point, we would not have come up with the consultation that they actually asked us to do.
Lawrence Warner: Right, but those outcomes have been determined to be SET ones.
Session 3 discussion
Chair: Leon Mann
John Bell: I have a comment that relates to two of the presentations. There is a very old saying, and I think it is very apposite in the context of priority setting, that he who pays the piper calls the tune. If you look at Mark Matthews' statistics, the one that he did not show us was who was actually paying for the research. My rough back-of-the-envelope calculation suggests that when you actually take into account the R&D tax concession and you look at where the dollars come from, probably state government funding of research is about 6 or 7 per cent of the national figure. So I think we have got to be careful not to overstate that figure, and you have got to take that into account when you consider creating new Ministerial Councils. Ministerial Councils, in my long years of experience with them, are a pretty mixed blessing, and in a situation where that sort of imbalance occurs, I think it is quite serious.
The other issue is whether or not the R&D Start program should fall within the priority setting. You have got to realise that R&D Start grants are 50 per cent taxable, so the maximum percentage that the Commonwealth pays is 50 per cent, and it is usually a good deal less than that. I think there is a good public policy argument that says that when the market is calling the tune, you don't attempt to set priorities at a government level. You only do that when you are dealing with government dollars. It comes back to my point that who pays the piper calls the tune. So I think that there is a good public policy case for excluding the R&D Start program.
I suppose the final point, Chairman, is just to make an observation that it is important to remember that when we introduced the GST we decided to assign all the revenue from that to the states, and there is a very strong view in Treasury in this town that the Commonwealth should cut back on its granting activities to state governments and to state instrumentalities, and to tell the states that this is now their responsibility to pay for from the GST. This is a factor that needs to be sorted out very carefully when we are looking at the role of state governments in this priority setting process over the next year. I would be interested in some of the comments, which I hope stir a reaction.
Mark Matthews: John, your first point about who pays the piper is a good one. You are right that when you factor in the tax concession the proportional state funding does go down. In those old years – again we have to work with old data for the system – it is about 9.3 per cent of cash funding, as you would know, so obviously you are right when you do throw in the tax concession. What one has got to remember is that that is in aggregate. What I was trying to do was show that when you break it down and look at the fields of research and socio-economic objectives, all right, resources might start to get fairly thinly spread, but we do have a significant division of labour there. I highlighted the agricultural area, and you are right in the context of the overall national budget, but when you are looking at the front-line troops, if you like, what is being delivered in the lab or wherever, then I think the role for Ministerial coordination is actually more convincing than the portrait that you paint.
On the other point, I did note research infrastructure, because there is this location, location, location factor, as estate agents say. The fixed capital component of R&D expenditure, which varies, as you know, very widely by field of research, I think is overall something like 4 or 5 per cent – it varies up and down – or something like that. You can perhaps correct me. So when you are talking about the infrastructure and decisions made about the location of infrastructure, some degree of coordination and the avoidance of duplication, you are not actually talking about massive amounts of money that are going there, and optimising that amount of money I think is important. And because states will always want a say in where that stuff is going, I think some degree of coordination is important.
Your last point was about the GST. Having spent the last year in the UK and wanting to understand the way things were working in Australia, I have been a bit surprised to see what has actually happened on the GST side. I am still trying to understand why more expenditure isn't going to the states, because I thought that was the policy.
Denzil Scrivens: Could I make a couple of very quick points in response to those questions about the states. I think it is true that there is an increasing perception that the states are fairly flush with GST funding. That certainly isn't the case in Queensland, where the last budget showed we have a deficit, which I think partly reflects the increasing pressures on the state budget, particularly in the key services like education and health. In terms of biomedical research, which is one of our priorities in Queensland and a national priority, one of the problems that we are facing, and which we want to have a discussion with the Commonwealth about strategically, is just who can bear the responsibility for the basic infrastructure for doing pure, basic, and applied medical research. In the past historically it has been left to the states to fund; we have largely had to fund the Queensland Institute of Medical Research and the hospital-type infrastructure. But the reality is the pressure out there, because we are state governments, primarily concerned with traditional services like acute hospital services and so on, is to actually put the money into hospital beds. There is enormous pressure politically at state government level, far more so than at federal government level, yet we will also be expected at the same time to fund New Age research infrastructure. So there is a real challenge there, and it is a real balancing act, I think, for our Premier to actually balance his commitment to research on the one hand with his commitment to basic hospital services on the other.
The second point was about the link between research priorities and innovation policies. I guess the R&D Start program was an example only. There are a whole variety of programs out there which states and the Commonwealth have in place to do with a whole innovation pipeline from research right through to commercialisation. We in our particular department do not try to separate, if we can help it, the research side from the innovation side. So I think we are just raising an issue there about where priorities begin and end for research and where they should begin and end for the innovation side of it. For example, at state government level we have a variety of incubation programs for universities and for companies starting out from the academic environment going into the commercial world. We have now established, on top of that general incubator stream, a particular bio-accelerator or an incubation for biotechnology companies. So there is an example of a state government actually saying, 'We are going to apply a certain part of our innovation funding to a particular thematic area called biotechnology.'
Tony Underwood (University of Sydney): I would just like to make a quick comment that follows some of the comments that have just been made, mostly addressed to Dr Matthews and also, with due deference, to the people talking about linguistics. In New South Wales, in environmental issues, which were one of Professor Barber's themes at lunchtime, we do have a whole-of-government approach but it is spelt 'hole'. The problem with it is that enormous sums of money are actually spent and they are sometimes listed as research in the figures that you use, but they are actually not. They follow the same principle as was outlined by Denzil about hospital beds versus research. The money is spent on on-the-ground works for rehabilitation of habitat, et cetera. It is listed as research, but none of it contributes to any of the underpinning information needs to actually achieve outcomes in the expenditure of that money.
So I guess my question is: is there any mechanism in view at all in this process that does not just say, 'Well, everybody sign up to national themes as research providers,' but is there going to be any way of getting states as research users to sign up to them as well? They are spending more money not achieving environmental outcomes, because they have not done the research, than the whole of government is spending on research on environmental outcomes. So it seems to me there is a useful way to turn some of this back and actually ask the states to play the game more sensibly.
Mark Matthews: Well, that was precisely why I made the suggestion at the end about looking at, if you like, the methods that we use in the budget setting process and agreeing a common methodology between the federal government and the state governments. The reason is that – and you gave a very good example – in announcing that we are going to throw so much money at problem X, if you actually ask, as a more structural element, 'Well, what are we going to spend in terms of basic research and roll-out funding or whatever?' – because it is not necessarily just commercialisation – you than need to pick up the out-turns. At the moment you can't wait till the ABS data comes out; we're just about to get the 2000 data and it's just too long to wait. But if you bring in elements of what you intend to spend and you do get faster about getting the out-turns, you can then say, because as you know the ABS is very strict about what counts as R&D, 'I'm sorry, New South Wales, you're not actually spending what you announced 18 months ago. That is a problem.' So that is why I think the budget methodologies are essential to delivering priorities. Without that it will be window-dressing. Well, that is a little bit blunt, but it is a risk.
Michael Barber: I had one comment and then a question which will come back to what Joanne said. The comment was that a decade or so back a government, under the wise counsel of Ralph Slatyer, took a major initiative to solve a problem. That initiative was to bring the business community, the universities and CSIRO together with a program called the Cooperative Research Centres, which – for those who remember that time – was very much about changing behaviour, changing culture, changing outcomes. In a sense there is probably an exercise where government could again take action, which in this case would need money, by contemplating that in fact we do need some such program which is not just grafting the social sciences onto the cooperative research centres but really trying to bring together the disciplines, the state government agencies and the community to tackle some of these multidisciplinary activities. So I would simply put that onto the table.
My question, which comes back a bit to Joanne's questions, is that listening in particular to Andrew Glenn I began to ask whether national priorities shouldn't be higher than we have been talking about. It seems to me that for a national priority to work, it has to be something that all of the nation can sign up to and can translate down to local action. If, for example, you take the word 'salinity' as a national priority, you would get a massive response in Western Australia, you'd get a massive response in the Murray-Darling, you'd get some response elsewhere round the country. But if you did pitch the national thing, perhaps, at the level that I suggested, that Australia has an aspiration to be a sustainable, environmentally friendly country, then it seems to me you wed into that a response in the west, round the western salinity framework, because salinity is the major issue; you bring into that framework the Tasmanian initiatives focused on the environment and the wilderness; and the Queenslanders, with the emphasis on the maintenance of the Great Barrier Reef. You think locally but act globally.
So I guess my question is: should national priorities be in fact very high-level priorities, because then again you drop them down at a state level to more focused ones, and then within the institutions you can drop them down and within agencies you can drop them down to focus your things, in this cascading model?
Andrew Glenn: You are probably right, Michael, in the sense that if this is going to work there has got to be a degree of ownership at some level by all the states. If we were to find a number of the states, perhaps the smaller, less wealthy states, were going to be excluded, I think that would present us with some significant national issues. But I would caution about trying to get everybody involved in everything, because that is equally unworkable. I think that by identifying some key priorities underneath the broad ones we can do that, and then that will help to get people aligned with those in a significant way. I think that would work.
Dick Davies (AMIRA International): Just a couple of comments on what a number of the speakers have touched on. Firstly, I think it is very important that we emphasise the importance of using the existing infrastructure and technologies as a platform for new technologies. Denzil mentioned a little bit in Queensland; as some of the other states have not been mentioned I will just very quickly mention two. In South Australia you could take something like the work that is being done at the University of South Australia on interfacial technology. It is principally being supported by the mining industry on tailings dam work, which is not exactly sexy, but the same group is also working with people like what was Fauldings Pharmaceuticals and Solar Optics, both of which were Adelaide companies which have gone a lot bigger and international. It overlaps into other areas like nanotechnology, inkjet printing and so on. Another example would be in Western Australia, with the computational fluid dynamics work done through the A J Parker Centre. The work that they are doing on refineries in the alumina area is not exactly sexy, but the same work is also applied to developing heart grafts in the medical area. I think that these sorts of things are areas of obvious strength that we need to develop.
The second point is on commercialisation. I would caution the involvement and excitement about start-up companies. I am in no way criticising the development of start-up companies, but I think we can underestimate the actual benefit and importance of commercialisation through incremental productivity gain. Denzil, you mentioned, for example, looking for biopharmaceuticals on the Barrier Reef. I have had some experience of attempting to develop some of those things, and the problem that you have in Australia is that there is no infrastructure or commercial ability to take the thing forward. What you do have in Queensland is a huge coal industry, and for example on a $10 billion export industry just a 1 per cent productivity increase is $100 million or so. These are big numbers that go right to the bottom line, and it is very important that we do not lose sight of where our real strengths are.
Denzil Scrivens: I agree with you completely about working out comparative advantages and strengths. Mining is a big issue for the Queensland government. It is one of our traditional strengths that we support as a state government, and we are supporting it in R&D in a couple of ways. One is that we are looking at things like clean coal technologies as well as alternative energies. We have also given money to the Sustainable Minerals Institute at the University of Queensland, which combines a very social science perspective as well as hard science to come up with some long-term issues about sustainable mining.
In terms of biodiscovery, we want to try and get to a position, if we can, 10 years down the track or five years down the track or 15, of being able to do a lot of that high-value research in Queensland. We now have our world-class clinical trials capacity at the Royal Brisbane Hospital/QIMR medical research institute, and it is linking up those sorts of opportunities with capacities in North Queensland, Central Queensland and university facilities in Brisbane and with commercial organisations using those natural organisms and samples, trying to work it right through the chain.
So we are concerned not just about the research and not just about the commercialisation, but the whole pipeline. We are in the process of using some quite innovative benefit-sharing agreements with companies, international best practice, to make them invest as much of their R&D in the state as possible. So rather than just take the samples out of the state, they will actually invest in JCU or UQ or somewhere else – or even, potentially, a bio-accelerator – to get a lot of this research done in Queensland.
It is a long haul, and we kid ourselves if we think we can get there overnight, but it is certainly an ambition of the Queensland government to try and diversify ourselves to the point that we don't just rely on our huge mining strengths, we also rely on things like biodiscovery.
John Keniry (Member, Consultative Panel): When we were in Albury, quite a few of the people at the meeting suggested that the increasing reliance on competitive grants for research funding was an active impediment, particularly for regional universities, in getting some sort of collaboration going. I think I heard in Denzil's presentation the same sort of suggestion, and to a lesser extent but by implication in yours, Andrew. In Albury I never really understood why this should be so, but now that three people are saying it I would be interested in any comments in why the relationship between competitive grants and impediments to collaboration, and why it is particularly in regional universities.
Andrew Glenn: I don't think it is necessarily only in regional universities. I think we still have some way to go in understanding the true nature of collaboration. I think if we take the CRC activity, at their very best they can work supremely well, but I have to say there are lots of CRCs where people are doing research much the same as they did before, and there are no new groupings of people. It is just the same groups within the same institution doing the same kind of stuff. So I think we have got to push that back a little bit further: can we create new teams that are perhaps going to do things in different ways?
The hard fact is that the amount of money you get from outside, the number of students you get, is going to influence very significantly the amount of money coming into an institution that is going to support jobs. So if you start going off the boil in terms of how well you are doing vis-à-vis the others, you are actually going to lose jobs. There are a lot of universities who are looking this year very carefully at their budgets, and those of you who read the pages of the Higher Education Supplement would be well aware of those. So if there are things that can affect that research performance in a negative way, then people would see that there are potential consequences.
I guess the upside of that is whether, by working together, you can be in a better position. Can you actually offer a much better environment for people to work in? And, if you like, it is that positive construction we still have some work to do on.
Session 4 discussion
Chair: Tim Besley
Robin Batterham: If I put it into one line, I would say that the Canadian investment – and very significant investment it has been – has really been a priority setting process but targeting more structural than thematic priorities. Would you care to comment on that?
David Strangway: I think that would be a very fair description. The fact that they are putting money into this area at all means it is already a government priority. The fact that they put it into equipment and facilities makes it a priority. It was not a government decision to do the synchrotron, but they gave us the capacity to do the synchrotron by giving us the funds. So there is not a lot of thematic in one sense, but there is more than meets the eye. I mentioned ourselves as the foundation for equipment and facilities; I mentioned the Canada Research Chairs as tools for the universities to decide how to go for their plans. But they did create these other Foundations. There is a Climate and Atmospheric Science Foundation, so clearly that is a priority. They created Genome Canada, so clearly that was a priority. There wasn't an open process such as you are going through at the present time that talked about those as priority setting. That was because a particular minister or a deputy minister wanted that kind of thing to happen, and there was enough buy-in of the community along the way that they knew that in an area like genome they could make that happen. So there is some thematic priority setting but not very much, and the bulk of the new money is going into forcing the institutions to develop their priorities.
That becomes more subtle than perhaps I have explained. If you are going to get 40 per cent from the provincial government, do the provincial government simply accept the university's priorities as defined by the Canada Foundation for Innovation, or do they influence them? My perception is that there is a lot of talk going on between the universities and their provincial governments before we get the proposals, because they know they are going to have to put the cheque up because they cannot possibly say to the university, 'You got 40 per cent for something really exciting. We are not going to do the other 40 per cent.' So it is a fascinating reverse leverage, in effect. The federal government gives us the money, we give it to the universities, and the provinces become the matching partners.
The history of Canada is that always the provinces are trying to get it out of the feds, and in this case the feds, through us, are in fact leveraging the provinces. In a way, that is why they like the program so much, because it brings the partners to the table in a new way. Quebec is an example. In the first two years of this program, Quebec kept writing to the minister in Ottawa and saying, 'You have set the priorities. Please just send us a cheque.' And the letters always went back to that minister in Quebec saying, 'No, we did nothing of the kind. That was done by the Canada Foundation. If you have got a complaint, go talk to David Strangway.' And it has taken two or three years for Quebec, in particular, to accept the fact that this is a pure competitive process, with no political intervention.
That has been really key, because if Quebec opted out of this – which they can't afford to, because their university presidents won't let them – others would opt out along the way. And if there were to be a federal-provincial agreement, we would still be negotiating it. It would never have happened, in effect. So it is a subtlety of the Canadian federal system, in effect.
Martin Dwyer (Institution of Engineers): I was wondering what effect you have seen on business expenditure on R&D as a result of this government initiative.
David Strangway: I don't think we are at a stage to document that very well yet. There are lots of anecdotes. Of the 20 per cent that I referred to, about half is coming from the private sector, so that is 10 per cent. The other half is coming from organisations – the Heart and Stroke Foundation, the Diabetes Foundation and so on – who see a really interesting leveraging potential from their perspective. What we are seeing and what we think we will be able to document is a couple of things.
First of all, because there are large, modern, state-of-the-art facilities, we have a perception that a fair number of the institutions are now working contractual arrangements with the private sector, who want to use those facilities to do whatever it is they want to do. We have not documented that, but I hear a lot of anecdotal stories about it.
The other area is that we organised a conference last February on commercialisation of university research. I don't think it's only CFI – it's many other things going on – but the whole issue of spin-off companies, for example, the whole issue of licensing and patenting, of making significant revenue, is really interesting because there is a lot of that happening. I mentioned those two figures that we produce twice as many spin-off companies and half as much licensing income as the US. My thesis on that is that, first of all, the universities are now realising that there is real money to be made out of these things. I mean, some universities are sitting on equity in these companies that is in the $10 million, $15 million, $20 million of money that has no strings on it, in effect. One very small institution is making $15 million a year, just as straight licensing revenue with again no strings on it. It may not be big in the whole scheme of things, but believe me, for a university president who can get a $15 million cheque with no strings it is a pretty nice thing to have.
So what seems to be happening is that the universities are getting very aggressive at doing this activity. The problem, I think, that explains those two figures, though, is that there is not much of a receptor capacity in Canada. When you try to get licensing income, there isn't a big company to license it to, so you have to create your company. So you create more companies, but you get less licensing revenue. My perception is that this is more than just a university problem. The problem really is: how does a small spin-off become a medium sized, or perhaps some day even a big, spin-off company? And it is the receptor capacity which isn't something that can be done this way. This pushes them, but there is a lot to be done in the next level of activity.
Vijoleta Braach-Maksvytis (CSIRO): The surplus obviously catalysed a lot of this activity. I am fascinated by the question of why science. Of all the choices that the government had to spend a surplus, why science?
David Strangway: If I could answer that question, we could solve a lot of problems. I don't know the answer to the question in detail. I was a university president at the time they started down this road. Many of us would believe that there was a very important meeting that took place in 1996. It was a meeting where 10 of us met with the Finance Minister, who at the end of the meeting said, 'Yes, this is going to be good for Canada. It is going to help us create jobs, et cetera et cetera,' and we claim credit for that particular event. However, the more I stay close to government the more I realise that we lobbied government for decades and nothing ever happened. So what you begin to realise is that you can lobby all you want, but if there isn't a receptivity nothing will happen. I suspect now that he was ready to do this, otherwise he wouldn't have met with us.
I don't know the conditions explicitly that led to this, but certainly the Finance Minister understood the issue and believed that Canada had to move to much more of a knowledge economy, and he was convinced that this was at least one of the things that had to be done. The Finance Minister was there, the Prime Minister was there – I am told the Prime Minister loves the opportunity to cut ribbons and things of that sort, and of course there is a lot of infrastructure that comes with this, a lot of buildings, equipment and so on – and the then Industry Minister was there. So we had a confluence of circumstances of three absolutely key people, with their deputies, who were totally committed to this idea and made it happen. Yes, they had lots of advice and lots of lobbying, but I think they were ready for it too. What led to it overall, I don't know.
David Green (Earth Sciences, ANU): How widely or narrowly, in practice, does the definition of community benefit go? Does it go as far as the inspiration and satisfaction of community curiosity, the basic research effort?
David Strangway: We are very clear, in our approach to the benefits to Canada, that it can be very widely defined. It can include the pride that goes with doing something absolutely outstanding and unique and unusual. We got involved, for example, with an institute for theoretical physics, the Perimeter Institute. That is a fascinating exercise, because an individual who had made a fortune on little paging devices put up $100 million to create an institute for theoretical physics. They came to us for the building. We can only do the capital, so we put money into the capital for the building. And the Prime Minister put another $25 million into it because he wanted to encourage the private sector to do more of this kind of stuff. My view of that Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics is that it is going to attract the world's very best, it is going to be an endowed operation, and that is something that Canada could and should take pride at. So that is a benefit to Canada.
Sometimes the benefit to Canada is interpreted as commercialisation, a spin-off company. And of course that is part of it too. When we are funding something in health research, it might just as well be assisting people with particular issues. Let me give an example. We have not done a lot of analysis of these 2,000 projects and how they fall in categories, but we are now doing a series of thematic reports which are the product of our process, rather than the input to our process. High-performance computing, as I already mentioned, is one of them. We have just finished a report on the new media, and it is amazing the things that are happening across the country in terms of bringing together the arts and culture and the technologies to do things around new media – not just making movies and all the rest of it, but some very interesting things going on where we have been catalytic to those effects.
The one that caught my attention, though, more than anything, was a realisation that we had funded a lot of centres that had to do with disability and ageing. When we looked at that we realised we had funded a centre for spinal cord activities, we had funded a source to do with blindness, we had funded a place to do with hard of hearing, we had funded a place that had to do with gait and movement disorders – which are increasingly issues, not just for the disabled but also for the elderly – and, interestingly, there were two colleges that were building centres for seniors on campus. They applied to us for equipment to do research on how they could help the elderly and ageing to use technology to reduce the rate of loss of the quality of life. When we put that whole package together, it was really amazing: we had funded a lot of things in disability and ageing. Well, that's a benefit to Canada.
So we choose very carefully. In our terminology, that is a very wide-based activity but we want you, when you put your proposal in, to think about it and we want you to be in a position to tell people why this was good for Canada.
Session 5 discussion
Chair: Tim Besley
Bruce Hobbs (CSIRO): Denis, I thank you for that. That was marvellous. I am addressing this to you: at one specific point I think what you said was that you had an internal venture capital group. Was it internal? And, because of the various other constraints that you have talked about, what kind of return on investment does that little group expect, and in what time frame?
Denis Wade: When it was set up, it was set up without any expectation that it would make money on money. It was set up to access technology and science; it was not set up to make money. Now, it has so transpired that it has made money, but it did not set out to do that. It operated in two ways. It operated initially by establishing our own venture funds in some countries or taking part in venture funds where there were well-established and well-run venture funds existing. Over the years, that has changed completely. We no longer take any part in any venture fund. But what we do is to invest directly – window equity, usually less than 20 per cent of equity – in start-up companies, and it is very hands-on investing.
We also start some companies. I have been involved in starting four or five now, which have been technology which we have stumbled across or which has come out of our own labs and we have chosen not to develop it for business reasons but the science was too good to walk away from.
Tony Underwood (University of Sydney): I am from the University of Sydney – I hope not to be one of the Group of Eight soon. We have heard from industry that is specific, but there are other industry groups out there who do in fact publish their research priorities. They are the research and development corporations. I just wonder if anybody can offer any comment on how different their processes are from the ones that you have outlined, because to me they sound remarkably different. There are several of them, they are national, they lever money from the government, they fund strategic and applied research and long-term issues and conglomerates, consortia, research institutes. How come it is apparently so different from the research and development corporations, from the views we have heard – which are fascinating, important, but fundamentally rather different?
Denis Wade: The first thing is that the industries involved invest in the R&D corporations by way of a compulsory levy, so they are 50 per cent funds at least. They are headed by corporation boards, and they have a role in directing the operations of the body. They work very, very closely in conjunction with their industry sector and other stakeholders in developing strategic plans and there is a strategic management model in the legislation they are required to conform to. So they go through that process, work out priorities and so on. There are rather exacting standards of accountability and reporting, so there is a heavily integrated process there to work out priorities over a period of time, a lot of interfacing with research agencies, of course, through a competitive bid process or commissioning of research. There is a totality of operations that they are all required to go through, and it just keeps on going. I hope that answers the question.
Bob Watts: There are two things. First of all, if we stand here and tell you what we are doing, we lose the IP protection. Secondly, generally these consortia are handling information for a consortium and the IP is usually protected up front in the university or wherever it is being done. In our case, I want to spring an advantage over Rio Tinto or whatever, and they would probably want to do the same to me, whereas when we are collaborating through, say, AMIRA, that is not an imperative. So there is that aspect to it.
The only reason we do the groundbreaking stuff inside the company is for competitive advantage. That gravity gradiometer, for example, that I mentioned we brought out 18 months or two years ago, was locked behind closed doors for five years, and you still won't find out much about it. These thin-strip castings are behind a fence where even company employees, even myself, have to sign special agreements to be allowed through. Basically, we are after strong competitive advantage because there is so much cash in it: thin-strip castings, $250 million; the Falcon, which is the gravity gradiometer, we have sunk probably $A50 million into that, and I know that other companies would love to have it. So there are very different imperatives in the two examples.
Graham Farquhar: My question was for Bob. I was interested in your comment about the fact that you had never heard a conversation involving the tax concession in the last five years or so. I just wondered: is it because you think the tax concession is too small, or what was the reason?
Bob Watts: When I have to justify the R&D budget, which I have to do regularly, what the company is interested in is the value added over a period of years, not how much it is costing this year. So what they are looking to see is: what is it going to do for the company when it is implemented? If I say to them, 'Well, I can do it for 30 per cent less if I make use of this tax concession,' for a company such as ours the change in spend is insignificant. So it is absolutely true that our tax guys go for it, but in setting the policies it has never been raised. I know that industry people, I think particularly the smaller ones – the SMEs and so on – do not like to hear that from people such as ourselves, but I am always asked, 'What's the NPV? What's it going to do for the company?' not, 'How much is it costing this year?' The incremental change is peanuts in the $20 billion or $30 billion that they churn through every year. That is why I made that comment. For a smaller company it may be very different, but for us that is how it is.
Denis Wade: I would agree generally. I don't believe it makes any difference now to whether JJR, my company here in Australia, stays in Australia or not. We have to stay here because we have got product on the market, we have got compounds in clinical testing around the world and we have got an interesting pipeline. It would not matter what the tax situation was. It did matter when the thing was set up, and I think it does matter, often, when companies first invest here. But whether or not it is a long-term sustained effort is only going to depend upon the quality of the science and the quality of the business science that we do.
Session 6 discussion
Chair: Chris Fell
Ros Engledow (Australian Vice-Chancellors Committee): This is more a comment, a piece of information, than a question. With reference to your concerns about being able to map how we are doing in terms of outputs such as patents, that is one of the areas that the research and research training management reports for our universities, established through the Department of Education, Science and Training, have established. That information is only being captured from this last year and, more specifically, this year. So that is an initiative that is already under way, which recognises the issues you were raising there. Similarly, the Australian Research Council, in collaboration with the Association for University Tertiary Managers (AUTM) in the United States, conducted a survey last year, the results of which are not out yet, and I believe are discussing – I am not sure to what extent – with the department how that might become a platform for capturing such information in the future.
Bruce Hobbs: Good. Thank you very much, but I guess my issue is that we have just spent an inordinate amount of money over the last year in trying to pull that same data together, right across Australia, and we have just finished that over the last couple of days. We have done a lot of work with ANU in pulling together citation indices and all that kind of business. We really need to have a national scheme that enables that to be followed up year after year after year, and ultimately plot a history of what we have achieved as a nation. All I say is that I am putting out a plea to make sure it happens. I know what the process is.
Toss Gascoigne (FASTS): Bruce, I wondered whether you had any comments on the national statistics that are available in Australia today. There has been some criticism of the quality and the continuity of these statistics, and I wondered whether you had any views on that, whether the availability of the statistics that we prepare here is something of an impediment to try to track the progress of Australian science and research, and its performance.
Bruce Hobbs: My answer is that undoubtedly all the data is there, but it is just difficult to get at. I really do believe that the NHMRC went about it the right way, and if you can demonstrate over a period of time, without any anecdotal work at all – which can always have its own slant on it – that this was what was actually achieved by the investment that was made by government, then you have got to be a heck of a lot better off than we are at the moment.
The other comment I would make, though, on statistics is that especially in those emerging areas of science, if you go to the way in which people collect that data at the moment and report on it in the ABS and various places, and the ARC's scheme of socio-economic type data that is there, often it is very difficult to actually pull out the bits that you really need to make a case, because it is so out of date and it is so amalgamated at a high level that the new, emerging areas just do not rate. So we need to do something desperate about that. And the four or five or whatever it is that ARC are now pushing, or have selected – have had forced upon them, or whatever the words are – are only the tip of the iceberg. I mean, nanotechnology is there but the more I start to talk to people, the more I see new, emerging areas of science at the boundaries between what people have been doing in the past that don't fit into those four categories either. They are the really exciting areas, and we need to track the development of those.
So the statistics are there and often they are good, but they are not pulled together properly in a uniform manner. Secondly, in some areas we don't have the statistics. And we should do something about it quick.
John Bell (Allen Consulting Group): I enjoyed your talk, Bruce, especially dealing with the Department of Finance and Administration, who are still locked in a time warp created by Lord Rothschild. But I think there is a take-home message from this talk for those who are designing the priorities. That is, at the end of the day somebody is going to want to run a measure over the outcomes that have been achieved from the priorities that come out of this exercise, and they are going to need to be designed in a way that actually makes the outcomes measurable.
My question, Bruce, is a more difficult one. CSIRO has its own well-established priority setting mechanism, and we are now looking at a national priority setting process which is quite different – independent, different parallel directions. How are you going to integrate the CSIRO priority setting process with the national one?
Bruce Hobbs: Can I make two comments. The first is on the early part of your question. One of the great things I have got out of this conference is meeting Leon Mann. Leon, of course, is driven by the idea that you should be able to follow this adventure that we are about to embark on and make sure that somebody can document the history of it eventually. So I aim to have long discussions with Leon in the near future to make sure that we do at least put forward a proposal, somewhere in the system, that enables some kind of consensus about how we might measure our progress in this adventure.
But to answer your last one, the reason that there is nothing on my last graph that is called a national priority is that the national priorities exercise seems to me, as I have said, an incredibly important thing to do because it addresses one of those problems that most countries have – that government has never said anything explicit about what they expect from the science and engineering and technology community. Getting back to how this will be implemented eventually, even that statement by itself, to me, is an absolute paradigm shift in the way in which a society operates, and it enables the community to understand where they fit in the general scheme of things. Everything you do, of course, doesn't have to address the national priority, but sure as heck it will guide the way in which organisations think in the future.
We, as I have said, have spent about two years in this process and the stuff that Graham Harris will talk about afterwards goes into that in a lot more detail. But we would hope that somewhere in all of that there are some of the things that address the national priorities that are ultimately identified. If we have missed the boat somewhere and we really need to change the way in which we will go, we will do it.
Chris Fell: I was quite fascinated by that list of income that comes from licence fees at various establishments. I am conscious that the University of Peking earns $200 million a year from its licences – quite genuinely. In fact, that is probably a higher percentage, as most of those are at top US universities. Certainly my interaction with the relevant ministries in China suggests that they had a probably closer handle on what the universities and their research bodies were outputting. Do you think there is anything we can learn from countries like China? We normally turn to the US or the UK.
Bruce Hobbs: I just would like to have all that data laid out. We did a little bit of benchmarking in Britain recently, with Oxford, Cambridge, Edinburgh and various places, and to some extent Cambridge University's only criterion is excellence – 'That's all there is to it, and we don't want to know anything else.' The revenue returned on their input is not all that great, but what they have inspired in the immediate vicinity is enormous. So if you are going to measure that university, the last thing you would want to do in that road map that I put up as the first slide is to say that Cambridge is a dreadful university because its return on royalties is bad. And that is what I mean by optimising the system rather than optimising every individual part of it.
It would be lovely to have that kind of data from places like China and so forth, so that we can understand as a country what we need to do, to do it better. We would learn a lot, I think.
Michael Barber: This is just a comment more than a question, Bruce, on the issue of using patents as a measure. You have just said that you should take a systems approach. I think that certainly in a lot of the work that we do, companies are just not interested in owning the technology. They are quite happy for the research institutions to own it. Speed of implementation and early access and implementation of that technology is absolutely critical. And I think the commercial return from that, if you look at some of the major industries, is a figure that we should really try to get. I agree with you entirely that it is very difficult to disaggregate the sort of data to get figures of that type, and that is something we have all got to try to work on.
Bruce Hobbs: True, and I am one of the first to say that a lot of R&D does not produce patents but produces a direct return to companies, if you happen to be in a collaborative agreement with that company. But the history is that that does not seem to make much of an impact on government. The story there is an absolutely superb story for Australia, but when you say it, people say no, you should have had more commercial ventures.
I was listening to Brendan Nelson yesterday in another forum, and that was his big message – that unless the research community in Australia starts to produce more commercial spin-offs and return on licensing and so forth, there is an issue. That is a message that is loud and clear, and Robin has said that many times also. I believe it is an issue too. There are a whole lot of structural things that have been put in place – if I can say, even the 30 per cent return for CSIRO from industry – that have been an enormous impediment to putting stuff out in the marketplace, because the first thing that somebody wants to do, if they have to earn 30 per cent, is to do it real fast. And that says you lose all the equity in companies, you get everything diluted, you don't worry about that. So there are lots of structural issues.
Graham Farquhar: I wondered whether or not you have done any work, or had any thoughts, about the actual changes in how R&D should be valued? If you have a look at how accountants generally value things, they have a particular model of doing it. If you think about the massive changes, say, even in options pricing and things like portfolio pricings and valuations, the changes to that have had dramatic effects because things that were regarded as having no value before, once they have got a mechanism or a methodology to value them, suddenly appear on the balance sheet. I wondered if you had had any thoughts about how R&D could be valued along those sorts of lines.
Bruce Hobbs: Yes. I have tried to do a lot of work, but again mainly with the Centre for International Economics, because they seemed to be the most receptive group around to actually work with. But a wise colleague of mine – I hope I can call him a colleague – told me that the only two things that are important are GDP per capita and jobs. If you look at my earlier list of nine effectiveness indicators, two of those are included in that. But obviously the community as a whole expects a whole lot of things to come with respect to quality of life and the environment in general, which are difficult to measure and traditionally are not measured in benefit-cost analyses that most economists do.
We have tried to get a process in place that enables you to put the cost on, say, a bushfire: what is the implication of doing research on fire retardants that are sprayed from choppers and that enable you to put out bushfires real fast? So, what would an actual person, like an insurance company, pay to have that technology developed? What would it mean to their bottom line? The people we have been working with have tried to go through those kinds of areas and pull out real numbers for what it costs the community in order to have, say, salinity fixed or whatever – that can be measured with loss of agricultural production and so forth, the quality of life et cetera – and put some real numbers on these things.
You can always argue about the numbers, but to me it is at least a step forward, to put real economic measures on those things that are not simply GDP or job related.
Session 7 discussion
Chair: Bruce McKellar
Michael Barber: I guess this is aimed at Alan. In a sense, because you started the roll with the Wills report, which very much was in expectation that these outcomes would lead to jobs and other dimensions, I was wondering if you cared to give, in perhaps a sentence or two, some indication of to what extent NHMRC had perhaps thought through some of the same issues that Bruce Hobbs was talking about – that you have really got to deliver on that outcome measure.
Alan Pettigrew: Well yes, and I was going to comment, if I had the opportunity, on how much I agreed with Bruce's presentation. We are going through that exercise of tracking the data. We have our own systems data but we are also trying to track down the issues of commercialisation, the issues of IP, of patents and how to attribute those to NHMRC funding or not, and the actual quality of the data and actually getting to the data are proving to be difficult.
Bruce Chapman: Could you comment on the importance of trying to understand the implications for the labour market, for example, and for budget outlays of different disease eradication options and agendas. If, for example, you are doing things that decrease the rate of death among children, you will have very significant changes for government necessary outlays on education, for labour productivity growth, for investment in human capital, which will be quite different from what is going on with diseases which are more likely to be among the older areas of the population, such as heart disease, which will affect retirement, superannuation outlays and other medical expenditures.
I think there is no doubt that these things are true and that the importance of the connections between the disciplines is fundamental, at least to illustrate what it means for taxes and government expenditure, for example. But what is the institutional context here? How do we get ourselves together better, in a way that might allow some of these synergies and connections to be developed?
Alan Pettigrew: I will have a go first. I think meetings such as this, to expose the issue, are the very first step. And I think that there needs to be a concerted effort to get the sectors actually talking together as much as possible. One of the problems that I face is that we are so busy doing what we have been charged to do that there is not as much time as I would like to see available amongst the senior players in NHMRC to carry out that interaction which is so crucially necessary.
I know that CSIRO is running, because they have got their performance measures to meet for government, as we do, and one tends to focus rather narrowly, I am afraid, when you have got those sorts of pressures. If there was an opportunity to be more adventurous and more expansive in actually working together as a set of organisations, then I am sure that we could achieve something. I am sure that is what is behind Robin Batterham's thinking on this – but for mine it is a matter of finding the time and getting an acceptance that we should be talking together. I think we should be talking together, but I think it needs a broad acceptance that that action needs to be undertaken.
I think it needs to come, as you reflect, in terms of the social policy and economic issues for the government. It needs to come from consideration at that highest level, I believe.
Graham Harris: I would like to say that we realise all the more that knowledge is an agent of change. We tend to have a series of narrow sectoral focuses but the society is a complex system. You pull a lever in one place and it has connotation elsewhere. I don't think we have been terribly good at that, on the whole. I think Western democracies just tend to muddle through and make it up as they go along. Like you, I prefer it to the alternative.
Bruce Hobbs: Alan, this sounds a bit like a mutual admiration society, but everything that CSIRO has done is based on what NHMRC did originally. It was a benchmark piece of work, in my view.
Let me say that you pointed out two important things. First, the time scales are enormous, and I think I have already heard Robin Batterham say in another context that if you are going to measure the outcomes of all this you have to be prepared to wait – hopefully, not 20 or 30 years, but a reasonable period of time. The other thing that often comes to mind – DoFA point this out explicitly – is that you can have these measures of outcomes but often it is difficult to attribute that outcome to precisely what you did. Has NHMRC given this any thought?
Alan Pettigrew: Yes, constantly. I don't have a quick answer for you, but one of the things that I am trying to encourage my people to do in the gathering of data is to work backwards. I think it is perhaps the only way we can do it. You may know of the conformant DRIPS type approach, where you take a major outcome and you work backwards, and you track it back through the literature to find out where their basic research was done and who supported it. I have a similar idea in mind, that what we should be doing is tracking back from some of the commercial outcomes. I know personally that the Cochlear outcome was generated from NHMRC support to Graeme Clark when he was in the Department of Physiology at the University of Sydney. I happened to inherit the same laboratory after he had left to move to Melbourne, so I know that from personal interaction. I know it also from Colin Sullivan's work which led to ResMed. When Colin came up with the idea, I was actually outside in the corridor and he dragged me in and said, 'What do you think about this as an idea?' So I feel at least some association with that.
ResMed was conceived in the '70's and Cochlear in the late '60's so that is the sort of timetable.
On working backwards, a more immediate one that I would like to look into and get some data on is going to the medically related CRCs, just going back a few years before they were CRCs to see what basic support they had, to lead to their becoming a CRC with the prospect of there being spin-off companies coming out of that, and patents and so on.
Sue Richardson (Academy of Social Sciences): I wanted to make two points. The first is that long time horizons constantly bug all of this evaluation, but I thought Alan was a bit unkind saying that you have to wait 25 years before you can see whether improvements in pre- and postnatal health are valuable. Children, after all, are beings as well as becomings, and I think that their wellbeing as children, including their health as children, matters immensely for its own sake, not just because they will turn out to be healthier adults. So I would measure the outcomes in a matter of a few years, not 25 years. That is the first point.
The second point is connected a bit to what Bruce Chapman was saying. It was about the connections again between the social sciences and the medical sciences. If I was approaching the question of the health of the nation, I think I would start with, first of all, the sort of measures that you have put forward, which I think are in many ways excellent in terms of the burden of disease, but then ask the question: what is the least-cost way of either making sure we don't go backwards in terms of disease, or the burden of disease, or making sure that we make some progress in reducing the burden of disease? It may not have anything to do with health sciences. It may be much more to do with the prevention of the behaviours that lead to the sort of diseases that are the ones right at the top of your list in terms of high burden of disease. It might have much more to do with the development of an underclass, or long periods of poverty and unemployment, or the sort of reasons why children are ceasing to be active and hence the developing obesity, or the addictions that are associated with alienation and withdrawal from society and so on.
There may be much better bang for your buck in terms of health outcomes by looking much more broadly than just at a bit of biological wizardry in the laboratories.
Alan Pettigrew: I agree with you. Could I just make one comment on that. One of the priorities that we have at the moment is making sure that we can track the link between the research and the health advice that we provide, which is the evidence base for improved health outcomes by advising doctors about the latest techniques in doing things. Getting that advice into the medical community so that they can apply it in the clinical setting to get the better health outcomes is a priority for us, and we have to work very closely with the National Institute for Clinical Studies, which is a new body set up through the Department of Health. It again is an independent body, with a focus on getting evidence-based guidelines actually implemented to lead to the better health outcomes. So there are a few steps along the way, but I agree with you in the overall framework. Can I say I also agree with you about health outcomes for children and pre- and postnatal. I could talk for hours about that.
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.
