HIGH FLYERS THINK TANK
National Research Priorities Strategic Forum
The Shine Dome, Canberra, 26-27 June 2002
Research priorities: A Queensland perspective
by Vivian Thelander and Denzil Scrivens
Vivian Thelander is Executive Director, Policy Program, Department of Innovation and Information Economy, Queensland. She studied computer science and mathematics at Melbourne University and management at Queensland University of Technology. She has more than 20 years experience of working in the ICT industry and in strategic application of ICT in Federal and Queensland Public Sector organisations. She joined the Commonwealth Public Service in 1981, working in the Australian Customs Service, Departments of Business and Consumer Affairs, and Industry, Technology and Commerce. Based in Queensland since 1989, she has worked in CITEC, Departments of Attorney-General, Consumer Affairs, Emergency Services, and Communication and Information. She led the development of public policy frameworks and initiatives to implement the Queensland Government's broad vision for the information age, the Communication and Information Strategic Plan.
Denzil Scrivens is Manager, Science and Research Policy and Strategy, Department of Innovation and Information Economy, Queensland. He leads a number of projects, including the Queensland R&D Strategy, the Queensland Biodiscovery Policy, and the Queensland Tropical Science Strategy. He also leads a team developing regulatory standards for biotechnology and in this context was the author of the Code of Ethical Practice for Biotechnology in Queensland (2001). He studied history at the University of Western Australia and the Australian National Univresity and public administration at the University of Queensland. He joined the Commonwealth Public Service in 1979, working in the Departments of Defence and Foreign Affairs before moving to Queensland. He has had extensive experience in the Queensland Public Service as a policy advisor, including nine years with the Department of the Premier and Cabinet.
Vivian Thelander
Thank you for this opportunity to present a Queensland perspective to this Forum. You cannot give a Queensland perspective without talking about Queensland's Smart State concept, and I would like to put that in a bit of context. Especially in a national audience like this I explain that although it is a simple concept, this is about creating a climate for innovation in Queensland. The aim is to explain to the people of Queensland the need for the state to change. We need to move away from some of its more traditional concerns towards embracing the new world of the information economy. On its re-election early last year, the government created the new Department of Innovation and Information Economy. It brought together the many elements of the Smart State strategy, and this includes the government's strategies for e-government and integrated service delivery, industry development strategies for the ICT and biotech and the other new industries, support for science and technology and, more broadly, innovation.
One of the first actions of this new department was to identify the need for a comprehensive review of the state government's R&D investment – as Dr Matthews pointed out before, the state government is certainly a big player in Queensland – and, very importantly, how it fits into the broader national picture. This is of course directly relevant to the Forum today. I would like now to introduce Denzil Scrivens, who is managing that review.
Denzil Scrivens
As Vivian has mentioned, the state government is developing a comprehensive strategy to guide the government's future investment in R&D. The state is certainly a major investor in research. We spend over $200 million annually in traditional areas such as agriculture, fisheries, forestry, natural resource management and the environment, and also, increasingly, health care and medical research. But I think what Mark's slides did not show, because they are based on slightly old ABS statistics, is that under the present government, the Beattie Labor government, the state has been making quite major and revolutionary investments in new knowledge industries and supporting technologies, in particular biotechnology, where it is spending over $217 million of state government money; biomedical research; nanotechnology, where Queensland has some unique expertise in biomaterials, particularly at the University of Queensland; software; supercomputing; light metals; fibre composites; alternative energies; and sustainable technologies. These investments by the state government complement significant investments by the private sector, particularly in traditional areas such as mining, engineering and construction, and more recently in software and, particularly, electronic security and multimedia games. They also complement major investments by the Commonwealth, including very major reef and oceans research taking place at AIMS and JCU in Townsville, although – and the Minister has asked me to say this, under pain of Public Service death if I don't – direct expenditure by the Commonwealth government in Queensland is significantly lower than in most other states, a situation we are certainly keen to address collaboratively and, hopefully, reverse.
Because of the heightened interest in science in Queensland – I think partly as a result of the very strong public profile in science adopted by Premier Beattie – the state government has been highly sought after as a source of funding for new R&D infrastructure, particularly by the universities. But the reality is that we are receiving many more extra requests for funding basic and applied research – including basic – than we can possibly meet from existing state government sources. I think the same is also true of the Commonwealth, judging by the many strong national bids which failed to get funding under the recent MNRF program and more recently the centre of excellence programs for biotech and ICT. And because of the competing and escalating demands, the state has been forced to make strategic and sometimes difficult choices about where our future investment in R&D should be, how best these investments can be managed, to provide maximum benefit for Queensland's growing R&D system. Hence the importance and centrality of the Queensland R&D Strategy, which we hope will provide us with a long-term framework for managing the state's research portfolio.
The Queensland strategy is in fact very broad, certainly broader than the current review into national priorities. We are examining not only priority areas for research, which of course are very important, but also the key future drivers of R&D; our skills and infrastructure needs right across the state; our strategic collaborations and alliances, including national and international; the management, organisation and funding of state R&D agencies; issues of commercialisation; very importantly, R&D in and for regional Queensland; and also the important area of research ethics. The strategy is attracting quite a lot of interest at the moment. We have just received over 120 submissions mostly from the research institutions, industry and the universities, and the submissions are still rolling in as I speak. Many of these submissions are really quite substantial and the result of a great deal of collaboration and thought throughout the institutions and across industry.
The national priority setting really does align quite well with the time frames for our review, which we hope to finish by the end of this year or early next year, although I would say that from my perspective the time frame for the national priority setting process – October – seems very tight. I think the Commonwealth may need to consider expanding its time frame just a little, to accommodate the many complex issues that its review is raising. Some of those issues have been raised, in fact, here today.
We are particularly keen at state level to ensure as far as we can that there is realignment and/or complementarity between Queensland's research priorities as they are developed and those of the nation. We were very pleased to have Joanne and Robin with us in Queensland just a few weeks back, when we held a major consultation on national priorities and state priorities at the Brisbane Customs House.
Could I just add a few comments now, very briefly, about national research priorities from my own perspective. They are not the comments of the Queensland government; we have not yet, obviously, finished our strategy. They are personal comments, particularly based on some of the submissions I have seen coming in to my branch.
There is a strong argument that Australia should articulate national research priorities. Our federal and state governments all have pressing national and state policy agendas, economic, social and environmental, that will require effective R&D solutions. And because governments simply cannot fund everything – we would love to but we can't – we have to have some idea which problems, which disciplines, which technologies and which approaches are most likely to provide the greatest return to the nation. So priorities must have regard to the national benefit, economic, social and environmental – the so-called triple bottom line. And the focus on benefit must be accompanied by better efforts at outcome measurement and evaluation.
I think the jury is still out on whether it is possible to establish a simple measure of R&D effectiveness across the board, but outcome measures must be built into R&D funding from the outset, both to assist the resource allocation processes of government and, importantly, to demonstrate the value of R&D investment to the community. It seems to me that the closer the alignment and agreement between government, business and the community about the value of science, the better the whole R&D system will be supported in this country. And part of this alignment, this agreement, is a shared understanding about the economic and social returns that wise investment in science can bring to Australia and the Australian community. The evidence is, or seems to be from across the world, that returns on good R&D can be very significant indeed.
Building on our research strengths must also focus on our comparative advantages. Australia cannot support everything, simply because it is new or sexy, otherwise we run the danger of spreading ourselves far too thinly. There is a strong view that we are much better off developing research capacity in existing areas of strength, or supporting new areas that relate to existing strengths. Thus in Queensland, for example, we have set aside $15 million for natural, terrestrial and marine based biodiscovery, because of Queensland's huge biodiversity, our existing strengths in medical research and biotechnology, and our growing capacity to develop and test new pharmaceutical drugs in Queensland.
Similarly, we are building on our primary industries R&D base, which is the largest in the Southern Hemisphere, by establishing a new research centre of excellence which we call Food for Life. This new centre will combine expertise from DPI, CSIRO and Brisbane universities, and will focus on state-of-the-art genomics and food processing technologies, with a particular focus on tropical and subtropical horticulture, seafood and meat research. So in this way we enhance the existing industry strengths by helping industry adapt to changing market requirements – in this case, healthy foods – and, along the way, create new knowledge industries with global potential.
Research excellence is also a key criterion in national priority setting and research funding, and it is interesting that most of our regional universities are saying the same thing. In Queensland it just so happens that most of our research funding has been concentrated in the south-east quarter of the state, mainly Brisbane-Gold Coast, where the bulk of our critical mass is located. But what many of our regional universities are saying to us is, 'Don't forget that excellence also resides in the regions.'
Not many people know in Australia, even in Queensland, that for example Townsville has the largest concentration of tropical marine science effort in the world, at JCU and AIMS and other research facilities in that region. It is a major R&D centre in its own right, and has enormous potential for future development as a leader in oceans and reef research, and in tropical science generally. Central Queensland University, at Gladstone, also has great potential as a leading centre for R&D in light metals, taking into account the $10 billion worth of metal and engineering projects under consideration in Central Queensland. Recognising this potential will, of course, require some rethinking of universities like Central Queensland University as primarily teaching universities and instead recognising their potential as research centres of excellence, of direct relevance to Australia's future.
Another theme coming out of the submissions that we are receiving is the importance for Commonwealth science policies to encourage effective collaboration and joint investment, rather than unhealthy or excessive competition. Competition is inevitable in a vigorous research system, but some people are saying to us that competition for research funding has got to the point where universities are less inclined than ever to collaborate or partner with others. That may be an issue more for regional universities, but even in the regions one would think there was huge scope for better sharing of resources, co-investment and cooperation.
National priorities, as we have heard today on a number of occasions, must also recognise multidisciplinary approaches. A lot of people are saying this to us. This includes the link between the physical and life sciences, and the social sciences, and the humanities. I think it will be quite difficult for the Commonwealth in practice to separate priority setting for SET and the social sciences and humanities, if only because social science and humanities perspectives are integral to dealing with many of the R&D challenges facing the world, particularly issues of sustainability.
A further issue in Queensland will be how far research priorities should influence the broader innovation policy setting. As we all know, there is much more to innovation than just the research. Willingness and capacity to adopt and exploit the outputs of research are critical. The Commonwealth issues paper states that research priorities will not apply to innovation programs like the R&D Start scheme. This scheme, as you know, is based on commercial potential, not predetermined priority areas. But is this the right approach? Successful innovation requires that the component parts of the whole system work together – the research, application, extension, innovation, investment and commercialisation. So why should one part of the system a priori be subject to national priorities and not the other?
Finally, whatever system we put in place for national priorities must have flexibility, to accommodate the unforeseen, the overlooked and emerging areas that may come out of left field, like HIV/AIDS. Deciding how much national research funding should be tied to specified priorities, and how detailed these priorities will be, are crucial issues. It may indeed be prudent to specify priorities only for a certain percentage of funding, or a certain part of funding, as did the ARC, rather than try to capture all research effort in a single framework. But how large this percentage or block should be is, of course, the key question.
We must also ensure that in focusing on national benefit, particularly for economic development, we do not place undue emphasis on short-term results at the expense of basic research that typically has longer-term focus and freer bounds of inquiry, yet is often highly productive in terms of new knowledge and human development. Like many governments, we in Queensland increasingly expect commercial returns from much of the research that we fund, a key objective being to encourage the rise of start-up companies in key knowledge industries like biotechnology. But we need to remind ourselves – and, I think, remind my colleagues in Commonwealth and state treasuries in particular – that basic as well as applied research has a vital role to play, that basic research leads to discovery and the discovery process can take many years to bear fruit. Therefore, expecting immediate results or forcing commercialisation too early can distort viable research programs that are fundamental to Australia's growth and international competitiveness.
