HIGH FLYERS THINK TANK

National Research Priorities Strategic Forum
26–27 June 2002

Session 8: What should Australia's research priorities be?
Chair: Michael Barber

Michael Barber is Secretary (Science Policy) for the Australian Academy of Science. He is also Pro Vice-Chancellor (Research and Innovation) at the University of Western Australia, with policy responsibility and general oversight of the University's research activities, postgraduate education, industry liaison, intellectual property and commercialisation. He is on the boards of several Cooperative Research Centres across Australia. He is also a director of a number of spin-off companies pursuing the commercial development of research. He is currently actively involved in the establishment of a new advanced software engineering centre on the Nedlands campus of the University of Western Australia, in collaboration with Motorola. With research interests in statistical mechanics, materials science and computational mathematics, he has published extensively in internationally refereed journals.

I need to do three bits of housekeeping before we move into this final session. Firstly, I would like to, on behalf of the four Academies, thank everybody for coming and the way that you have participated. Special thanks to our speakers, who were in many cases given really indecent notice of being asked to perform – I think all of you have in fact reached far beyond what we could have expected when the time came. I also need to thank our sponsors, the Department of Education, Science and Training, whose resources made this event possible. I hope that DEST and the people here have felt that we have contributed to a message to take away with them from the four Academies that this is, in the words of Bruce Hobbs this morning, of vital importance to Australia. The final piece of housekeeping is that a number of people have asked if they could have information on the Canadian Foundation for Innovation, and on the front table, in the foyer, there are copies of the overheads that David Strangway presented this morning.

So what should be Australia's research priorities? I will pick up a number of themes running through, to particularly try and focus a little bit back to where Joanne started us from. I have heard some wonderful ideas which come into description. Bob Watts said we need a value proposition, we need to account to government and describe to government a competitive advantage for Australia. I also have to admit I like Graham Harris's comment this morning that we should remember that knowledge is an agent of change. So I think those ideas begin to come through in defining what might be an effective level of priority.

I have pulled some things together under the broad banner that I presented yesterday:

• mental and physical health of ageing
• human stem cell research
• Biotech Centre
• medical device technology
• Cochlear, ResMed
• Preventative Health
• Foods for Health and Wealth

We can move again and look at the NHMRC priorities:

• indigenous health
• mental health
• rural and remote health care
• nutrition and food safety

Let me turn now to 'Wealth Generation' – unashamedly on the table for the economic development of Australia:

• biotechnology
  • Biotech Centre
  • ARC and NHMRC priority
• nanoscale material science/nanotechnology
  • ARC priority
  • CSIRO emergent science
• information and communications technology
  • ICT Centre
  • E-Australia
  • complex systems
  • ARC priority/CSIRO emergent science
• Light Metals for Australia
• Foods for Health and Wealth

And we can consider environmental sustainability:

• Healthy Country
  • environmental remediation and degradation
  • salinity
  • biodiversity
• Wealth from Australia's Oceans
  • marine science
  • extended economic zone
• 'Beyond Kyoto'
  • Energy Transformed
  • greenhouse gas abatement

I am going to throw to the community a question. It is really to the science community, and unapologetically this question is on science. We have heard a lot about our 2 per cent and the importance of getting to the other 98 per cent of the world's science. Is there some science out there which will cause the world to beat a way to Australia's door on scientific grounds? And, if there is, should we actually be thinking about that as one of our national priorities?

I have one suggestion for you, and I am going to end by showing a map that Robin actually used when he first started talking about priorities.

He correctly pointed out that the lights are where the GDP is. My question: is there some science for which the blackness matters, and for which the world will look? I leave you with one example and encourage you to think about whether there are any others. The one I know about is the square-kilometre array. The world will want to build, by about 2010-15, a new-generation radio telescope. As I understand it, there are three places in the world where it would need to be put, because you need radio silence. One will be in Sahara, one will be in the Gobi Desert and one is in Australia – a no-brainer, I would have thought, for where we built it. If that was to be a national priority, it seems to me that to achieve it the science would be the least important part. It needs a lot of hard work on the spin-offs, all the benefits that flow, and it needs engagement by government at the very senior level to lead it.

What I want to leave you with is not so much that I am an advocate for the square-kilometre array, although I sense you can see that from a scientific point of view I think it is exciting. I raise it simply as a question. That would be an example where the world would come to Australia, not because we were 2 per cent of the world, not because it is a nice place to look at interesting plants, but because it is the only place on the globe where the world could do that science. I would be interested to know if there were any other suggestions.