HIGH FLYERS THINK TANK
National Research Priorities Strategic Forum
The Shine Dome, Canberra, 26-27 June 2002
Reflections from a Consultative Panel Member
by Graham Farquhar
Graham Farquhar is Group Leader at the Research School of Biological Sciences, Australian National University. He is a member of the Higher Level Steering Committee, National Carbon Accounting System, Australian Greenhouse Office and a member of the Editorial Board of Global Change. He was formerly Deputy CEO and Program Leader, CRC for Greenhouse Accounting. In 2001 he was awarded Leading Australian Citation Laureate and the CSIRO medal for team research. His areas of interest include integration of photosynthesis and growth with nitrogen and water, use of plants, stomatal physiology, isotopic composition of plants and global change science.
Well, after what Michael said at the Press Club earlier today, I really owe him more than one beer. Thanks, everybody, for inviting me. I would like to say to the other panellists that are here – and they are all here except for Melissa – that I have actually enjoyed the process of getting to know the people on the Panel. That has been the best bit.
The goal of the exercise was to seek the views of the community and stakeholders on the framework set out in the Issues Paper and to seek the views of the community and stakeholders on preferred priorities, together with a vision for Australia, and there was some ambiguity about that. Notice how it comes at the end rather than at the beginning.
First I will say how Sub-panel 2 worked, which is the one that I was in. The whole panel was chaired by Robin Batterham, and he came to a small number of the meetings. In Subpanel 2 we went north-south, from Darwin down to Hobart, and Subpanel 1 was the east-west travelling one, from I guess Melbourne across to Perth.
I would draw your attention, while we are there, to the makeup. There is a bit of social science in the Panel there. We have got business people and academics and researchers. I would have to say that at least in the panel that I was working in – and I'm sure it would be true of the other panel – Joanne Daly formed an integral part, in the sense that she was involved with the discussions as they occurred.
The way that we ran it in our panel changed with experience. So Hobart, which was the first one, was quite different from the last one for us, I think in Townsville. It evolved with experience. We found that it was best, actually, to talk about the process initially – the sorts of things that Joanne has mentioned – with some feedback from us, and then we would break for tea and catch up with the people who seemed to have interesting things to say or were looking pretty nervous, and have informal discussions with them to see where we were going to be heading. Chris Fell, who was our chairman, would always remind us that you can't think and list at the same time, so we would then have a quick 'brain dump', as he would call it, on vision, where we would get all the vision statements down. This was actually quite good at giving some context to where the breadth of the science and of the research had to go.
So then we would move on to looking at preferred priorities, and there would be some feedback there from the Panel, usually giving some guidance on breadth. This is where I would use the Fellini 8½ rule, where 10 is the Healthy, wealthy and wise, and 1 is the Effects of epicuticular waxes on the stomatal conductants of Eucalyptus pauciflora, and 8½ is where you have to be. After that, the Subpanel would meet to summarise.
In the summary we would comment on the meeting, the kinds of people we would get. For example, in Sydney we had 30 per cent of people from the private sector, through to some places where we, for example, only had people from government departments, virtually, or in some places almost solely from the university sector. It was quite varied. And then we would give feedback on the framework and note any comments about the implementation strategy, the priorities themselves and the vision (even though the vision we would always say should come before the priorities, of course) and general comments.
We also had targeted meetings in Sydney, Melbourne and Canberra. I went to the ones in Sydney and sat in on Subpanel 1's Canberra meeting, and they were quite different because they had representatives of various peak bodies and it was sort of a round table. I would comment that when Robin was present, the flavour of the meetings tended to be quite different, because people thought that by speaking to him directly they could get authoritative views. So that was the case when he would chair the meetings.
I will move on, then, to some personal reflections about the meetings. I preface it by saying that most people here have been to one or two of the meetings and so they will have heard these kinds of comments, so I am actually not saying anything very new. Most people, I guess, were accepting that priorities are a reasonable thing, with the devil being in the detail, obviously. A clear message that I got was the importance of sustaining quality basic research; we got that message every time. We certainly got the message that outcomes required more than science, engineering and technology. Joanne made the point that in fact it is not restricted, but clearly the implication seemed to be to most people that this was only going to be SET. Eventually, after a couple of meetings, we would actually start out the meetings by saying, 'We already have the message about SET not being the sole goal, that we need social sciences and humanities to achieve outcomes for Australia. So unless you have got something new to say about that, we don't want to hear from you.' But we didn't say that.
We also got a lot of comments about the time scale. There is a three-year figure in there, and most people made the comment that the time scale of three years is very short for most outputs of interest. But the general feeling was that an annual review was okay. By annual review I do not mean a stop-go review but a review that is just recording that you are on track. The thematic approach does require the ingredients for uptake, the infrastructure, to exist already. That obviously intersects with any time scale that one has, and so if the time scale is three to five years, it is pretty clear that some of those priorities would have to be in areas like agribusiness, health, mining, public good like greenhouse and so on, where you can actually do something straight away, because there would not be the time to build up an infrastructure. That is an area of implementation that I am sure people here will be wishing to comment on.
An issue that came out that I was pleased about, and that we heard about at every site, was the importance of science education – I don't need to convince you here of its importance – but also extension. My Dad was an agricultural extension worker, as my panellists are bored to hear. Every time I would go out and open the boot of the Vauxhall, there would be the smell of blood-and-bone and potato sack and superphosphate and so on, so it is in my blood. It was a great system because you had the feedback from the users of research going back to the researchers and vice versa. It doesn't really matter whether it is funded from the private sector or the public sector, it is an important system. We heard over and over again how that needs to be built up in other areas apart from agriculture, where it has obviously been so successful as Australia's farmers have to deal with the novel environment that they find themselves in here.
As Joanne said, we had few comments about the criteria. I suspect it must mean that the criteria are ones that people are fairly happy with. Obviously, people were happy that excellence was to be supported and that public good was to be supported, but they took it, I think, automatically that wealth generation and so on would be on the agenda.
Now I want to do some mental arithmetic about scale. This is purely out of my head. If there were five themes that represented, say, 25 per cent of expenditure – and I just say 25 per cent, not because there has been any hint from anybody in government about what the percentage should be, but suppose it were – that would say that each one would be about 5 per cent. Just to give you a feeling for the scale of things, that would be roughly comparable to a thematic area of Commonwealth support of science and innovation, because there are about 12 of these and they are at the scale of things like primary products, health, that kind of scale. So that is the sort of scale that one of 5 per cent would be. Or, equivalently, looking at it from a disciplinary point of view as distinct from a theme, it is equivalent in the Australian classifications of a division, of which 10 are in SET and there are 22 in all. They are at the level of something like biological sciences, or chemical sciences. By the time you get down to things like disciplines – immunology, to take the example that we heard from Michael earlier today – you are down around the fraction of a per cent. So that is the kind of scale that you would be at if we were to lead up to five times five, for example. As I said, this is not the number that the government is thinking about; it is just to give you an idea of scale.
I hope that we have lots of innovators in the country and that they have noted the last part of the last criterion, which was that the successful priorities had to have the scope for Australia to capture the benefits of the research through the potential of the research to enhance significantly Australia's overall innovation capacity by the broadening of the knowledge base and fostering acquisition of skills and understanding of emerging 'hot sciences'. So, bring on the hot sciences.
There is one thing that I have been disappointed about so far and I have urged people at the last lot of meetings to actually talk about it, saying, 'Let's hear some proposals for exciting blue-sky research that will capture the country's imagination.' It strikes me that there are all kinds of things that we can do. We potentially can breed plants that grow in saline soils; we potentially can get energy from hot rocks. There are all kinds of things that we can do. I would personally be very pleased if one of the priorities ended up being one that was quite a blue-sky one, that actually promoted the culture of research. So there's a challenge for the innovators in the country.
