HIGH FLYERS THINK TANK

National Research Priorities Strategic Forum
26–27 June 2002

Developing national research priorities
Joanne Daly

Joanne Daly is Branch Head of the Science Division, Commonwealth Department of Education, Science and Training and heads the Taskforce that is assisting Government to set national research priorities, in consultation with the research and wider community. She is on secondment from CSIRO Entomology where she was a senior principal research scientist. Her research interest is evolutionary biology.

I would firstly like to thank the Academy for hosting this session for the next day and a half. It has been enormously helpful to our process that the four Academies have been actively engaged in this process right from the start – and I am very heartily glad also that it is all four Academies, by the way, not just the SET ones.

I realised when Michael Barber was talking at the Press Club that I would bring you back down to earth with a fairly mundane and rather process-driven talk – perhaps in my Public Service mould, I don’t know. But Michael gave an excellent overview of the priorities process and set a number of issues around vision, and excited us, I think, with a number of ideas about the sorts of things we would need to think about in choosing priorities.

I thought it would be useful to reflect on the public consultations that have just gone on. The Taskforce that I head up is actually in the background in this consultation process; our role is to help the Consultative Panel go out and listen to views. And so I thought it would be useful for me, as head of the Taskforce, to reflect on how I thought the consultative process went – what were the things that I liked about it but also what were the gaps that came through in that process. Perhaps during this next day and a half we could try to fill some of those gaps.

I just want to cover three brief topics: Why set priorities? I just want to set the scene on that; secondly, to think about the process that is going on at present; and, thirdly, to reflect briefly on some of the gaps.

Some of the Consultative Panel will actually recognise some of these slides. In many ways, it seemed that setting priorities has come out of the Backing Australia’s Ability initiative of the government which was launched at the beginning of last year. But I would say that in fact the priority process began well before that. Certainly the government articulated through BAA that it wanted to ensure that the new money that it was investing was in areas in which Australia enjoys or wants to build a competitive advantage, and certainly the BAA initiative was around innovation, and so this is a very appropriate vision that initiative had.

However, this country has been thinking about national research priorities for some time, not necessarily using that title. In 1996 we had the ASTEC report on priorities; we had John Stocker’s report on priority matters – I think it was in 1997; we had Robin Batterham’s paper ‘Chance for Change’ in 2001, and so on. So the community as a whole, particularly the research community, has been actively thinking about priorities over at least the half-decade.

Broadly, there are two reasons to set priorities. The first is to make sure the research that we do as a country is focused on significant issues, including those that are unique to this country. We need to ensure that whatever research we do – and this is a very broad research base that we have in Australia – we certainly need to make sure that some of that effort is focused on the kinds of needs and opportunities that this country has. We also need to set priorities to ensure that we have critical mass in those areas. There is not much point in our having the classic one man and his dog working on something of major significance.

The priorities process itself is well in train, and many of you are engaged in this process. I didn’t want to go too much into the background; you have already been inundated, I think, with that to date. Here is the sort of timetable. It is very tight, but I would reflect that, as I said, we have been thinking about these sorts of issues as a nation for over half a decade. The Issues Paper was released at the end of May and we have just completed the public consultation phase. The submissions on the proposed process are due in this Friday. Also, if you have an indication of the kinds of priority areas that you would to see up, we would like you to put them into those submissions. You don’t have to give us detailed justification at this stage, but it would be helpful to us to get a sense of where you are coming from on priority issues.

In late July the government will release its agreed approach to setting priorities. These will be announced, I think, in very late July or perhaps early August. The written submissions, in which you were asked to nominate your priorities, will be due in on 9 August. Clearly, if there was a delay in releasing that agreed approach, this date would also shift. We anticipate at this stage that government will announce the priorities publicly in about October, and then in the ensuing months the agencies and funding bodies affected by those priorities would start to develop their implementation plans.

What are the expectations of these priorities? The first and most important that we see is that these priorities should be able to engage the broader community. Some of these priorities should come out of the broader community and they certainly should be identifiable by the broader community. They should be aspirational – I have to say it is a funny word in some ways; it always reminds me of ‘asthma’ or something like that – that is, the priorities should be able to inspire people as something that we really want to work towards. And the priorities should be able to deliver significant benefits to Australia. These benefits might be economic, they might be social or they might be environmental, but the benefits must be significant to be called a national research priority.

The key elements of the process are that this year we will consider priorities for all areas of research. This certainly was one area, I think, causing confusion in some of our consultations. The Issues Paper does say that the thematic priorities, by their nature, are broad. However, the process of implementation this year will only be for science, engineering and technology. The process will be fully extended to social sciences and humanities next year, meaning there will be a second opportunity to extend the choosing of priorities to those which are more social science and humanities focused, but also the implementation will occur for those two broad areas next year.

Also, the process builds on existing priority setting. It is not meant to replace any of the priority setting going on. In fact, this priority setting process will only work in a country which has robust priority setting mechanisms well and truly in place. So in fact we are building on those processes and providing an overarching framework for all the current priority setting processes.

A very key element is that the priority process should lead to greater coordination and collaboration across institutions and sectors. This is not about setting priorities for CSIRO, Geoscience Australia, the ARC. This is about setting priorities across all those bodies, across the whole of government. As Michael so eloquently said in his Press Club Address at lunch time today, in some cases all that might be required is far greater cooperation and collaboration across existing institutions, rather than a shift in resources.

My first point here is somewhat controversial and I got quite a lot of feedback about this in the consultation process. The government intends this process to be budget neutral. That is, its R&D budget is $5.1 billion next year, and this process is intended to fit within that budget. It is not like the ARC process, where there were additional resources put into priority areas. So the priorities will be set within the