An Exhibition of Callous Destructiveness. (March 10, 2006)

    The Federation of Australian Scientific and Technological Societies (FASTS) held its sixth "Science Meets Parliament" from March 8/9. The federation has still to report on the events and outcomes of the two-day meeting but one notable event was the address at the National Press Club luncheon by the Minister for Education Science and Training, Brendan Nelson on Tuesday.

A full if somewhat garbled transcript of his address is available. The importance of Dr Nelson's comments to his listeners would be difficult to overestimate. It demonstrates what appears to be a wilful lack of understanding of the needs of the nation with regard to its commonwealth.

Below are relevant passages from Dr Nelson's speech. If you believe that he is being misrepresented by the excerpts go to the full transcript

We are as a relatively small country not in the position of being able to afford research which is not of the highest quality ...and I think people in this room do understand it. That many of us as Australians are struggling to come to terms with it, that the only benchmarks, the only ones that are going to count increasingly are international ones on standards.  As a relatively small country we cannot afford to support and fund anything less than the highest quality.

And yet the Coalition Government's support for mathematics and the enabling sciences remains woeful. CSIRO's media release of March 8^th is a case in point.

In 1854, George Boole, (for the mathematicians here, I think Gareth's here), would know that George Boole produced his Boolean algebra. And most people at the time thought well that's interesting but what use is that? It wasn't for another ninety years until Claude Shannon in the 1940’s took George Boole's algebra and developed it as the language of the computer and the basis of digital computation.

Here you might think that Dr Nelson is being an advocate for fundamental research perhaps even what we might call shear cussed intellectual inquisitiveness. Not a bit of it.

ANU was ranked, I think, sixteen in the Times Higher Education Supplement recently and fifty-third in Shanghai Jiao Tong. No matter what lead table you use, ANU is closer to the top of Australia's universities internationally than it would be regarded to be at the bottom.

ANU is outstanding at investigative driven research. Original research. Absolutely brilliant. It’s commercial outcomes are not quite so strong. Only 0.2% of ANU's research revenues are actually attributed to licence revenues. It's about 300 thousand dollars. About the same as the University of South Australia in terms of commercialisation of research.

Our vision has got to be without any coercion from Government, but creating a framework in which it might be facilitated to see that CSIRO, which by any standard, is a world class institution which cannot afford to stand still, that CSIRO and ANU in particular, form much closer collaborations and relationships as we go forward. There should never be any coercion from Government in driving collaboration, no matter how close it is, between institutions like this. But we've got to create a framework where we can envisage a future where not just CSIRO and ANU, but other institutions in this country in every sense of the word are world class. Understanding necessarily we have a relatively limited tax base, a collapsing aged dependency ratio and a limited population.

Now what Dr Nelson is telling his FASTS audience CSIRO does and what in fact it is doing are not quit the same. It is floundering with little sign that matters will improve in the near future.

Another priority as I mentioned is commercialisation.... Mark Vitale is as you know Professor at AGSM [Australian Graduate School of Management]. Vitale asked the rhetorical question in Biotech: "When researchers apply for competitive grants, whether ARC or NH & MRC, should not one of the questions be - to what extent does the institution within which you conduct your research actually support and drive a commercial outcome?" Good question. It's not my place to provide the answer, but I invite you and your community over the next year to tell us what you think the answer should be because it's a valid one, that not everyday Australians might be thinking about with too much frequency, but nonetheless which would pass their mind.

Finally, Dr Nelson got onto the matter of his Issues Paper, Building University Diversity: Future approval and accreditation processes for Australian Higher education leading to the matter of moving the goal posts so that a wholly teaching tertiary institution could call itself a university and throws in the following observation:

The nonsense that I've had to go through in the last two years (inaudible) Melbourne University Private.

Is the minister telling us that in his view a de facto teaching only university already exists, so what are you carrying on about?

What should be carried on about is that Dr Nelson, the Prime Minister, and their cabinet colleagues are either unable or unwilling to accept that unless a solid fundamental research infrastructure is in place in the nation's universities with which to underpin strategic and applied research and their commercialisation the edifice they want to build will be an air castle. Two days ago Dr David Mitchell, who heads a group of bioinformaticians and statisticians at CSIRO Mathematical and Information Sciences and Professor Peter Hall of ANU's Mathematical Sciences Institute issued a statement saying there is a critical need for personnel trained using the appropriate analytical tools to allow an Australian biotechnology sector to be able to mix it with world competition but those individuals are in critically short supply. So you might think when Dr Nelson says to FASTS, "the only benchmarks, the only ones that are going to count increasingly are international ones on standards.  As a relatively small country we cannot afford to support and fund anything less than the highest quality," that Mitchell's and Hall's assessment might fall on fertile ground. So far there has been little sign of it, despite Professor Hall pointing out, "The main problem is the greatly reduced capacity of our schools and universities to train professionals in the mathematical and statistical sciences. For example, the number of mathematicians working in our universities today is almost 40% fewer than it was a decade ago."

So is it going to be the call "Science met Parliament" -- Science lost?