Photo: Roach Industries

    The conSCIENCE page in the June issue of Australasian Science is written by civil engineer Ted Roach who "is Managing Director of Roach Industries and has three decades’ experience in physics research and commercial R&D."

 

Mr Roach clearly has a bone to pick with our public representatives. Noting that "Japan has always maintained a healthy trade balance... Australia is living on the export of minerals while foreign debt has been increasing exponentially over the past 30 years to $500 billion. If continued, this debt will reach $3 billion per week in 2 years. This trend is unsustainable and is due to Australia’s inability to manufacture and export elaborately transformed manufactured goods (ETMs). If continued, Australia will join third world countries that cannot afford public sector research organisations or even universities."

 

And Mr Roach claims "The Japanese government’s expenditure on commercial R&D is 12 times more efficient in producing ETM exports than the Australian government’s" and states that the reason is, "In the 1950s, the Japanese government encouraged development of commercial research centres in the private sector [and] ...funding is based on outcomes, not management, as is the case with Australia’s CSIRO. ...Japan has thousands of private commercial research centres, Australia has none. Federal and State government policies have deliberately stifled them with scattergun R&D funding to private companies at a government’s whim. This has been a disaster for research."

 

And he concludes with the damning assertion, "Federal policymakers oppose private sector commercial R&D centres, seeing them as competition to public sector centres. If it were the Olympic Games, Australia would be at the 8-metre mark and CSIRO on the starting blocks when Japan was finishing a 100-metre race."

 

As is pointed out by Australasian Science "Ted Roach’s company, Roach Industries Pty Ltd, promotes commercial research centres as the avenue to develop ETM exports and address Australia’s exponentially increasing foreign debt." So he has a vested interest in promoting his views.

 

Nevertheless, it is legitimate to ask, "Is he Right?"