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SCIENTIFIC RESEARCH CAUGHT IN MORTIMER'S WAKE
24 July 1997

The President of the Australian Academy of Science, Professor Gus Nossal, today welcomed the Mortimer Review's approach to economic development.

"We welcome the Review's strategy. Government should have longer-term plans for developing the industries that will provide wealth and jobs for our future.

The Review acknowledges that industry will under-invest in R&D unless governments intervene.

The Academy also welcomes the proposed rationalisation of the tax deduction scheme for business R&D. We see no reason why it should not work as Mortimer has prescribed.

However, there are some regrettable gaps in the Review's logic, perhaps because they have failed to distinguish basic and strategic research from application.

Almost as a by-product of its plans for industry, the Mortimer review has proposed a substantial cut to Australia's basic scientific research effort, and an equally severe cut to the strategic research of CSIRO.

It proposes to destroy the CRC program leaving a rump of $20 million for 'public good' research. This is a curious conclusion, given that the Review accepts

• that business under-invests in research because many of the benefits can not be contained, but spill over into the whole economy
  
• the CRC program has successfully brought researchers together with industry and other researchers
  
• that even at this early stage in its life the CRC program has brought benefits exceeding the expenditure on it.

The only reason given for abandoning this successful initiative is a doctrinaire and formal one - it is 'inconsistent with the Review's program design principles'.

The 'customer-contractor' principle is one way of proceeding but is not applicable in this case.

The CRCs have built up a momentum of cultural change in research and industry that must not be slowed or halted, and are in fact corporate structures independent of the partner 'institutions or providers'.

The universities are also targeted for further cuts in public funding through the requirement for extra outside funding. Universities are under great financial stress at present; further cuts would be total folly.

The higher external funding targets for CSIRO are not achievable in the short term without cutting further into its public-good role and the strategic research it performs for industry in general.

The withdrawal of public money from the rural research funds is unjustified and unjustifiable. The impact on CSIRO, among others, would be severe.

The combined effects of the cuts in funding for basic research would be a drastic loss of opportunity for younger researchers. Several hundred positions in the CRCs, universities and CSIRO would disappear.

The cultivation of talented young people is an essential part of any strategy for innovation. Basic and strategic research are the training grounds for such people."