HIGH FLYERS THINK TANK

National Research Priorities Strategic Forum
26–27 June 2002

Broad-ranging discussion

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 wh