Canada's Coming Election Holds Relevance for Australia. (September 18, 2008)

Three weeks before US citizens are due to vote for their next president and vice-president (as well as all members of the House of Representatives and one-third of the US Senate) thirty-three million Canadian's will elect a new government. In all likelihood the Conservative government of Stephen Harper will be returned with a comfortable majority allowing it to form a government in it own right; at present Mr Harper leads a minority government.

So far science policy doesn't appear to have even come up to periscope depth, let alone surfaced, with the exception of the climate. Last week, for example, four former prime ministers — two Conservative and two Liberal — signed the Canadians for Climate Leadership Declaration. It calls for action without many specifics, but it does call for pricing carbon -- Can$30 (A$35.20) per tonne CO₂ equivalent -- as an essential part of tackling climate change.

Currently Canada's per capita emissions and energy consumption are among the highest in the world despite having been one of the first nation's to have ratified the Kyoto Protocols.

In its lead editorial this week Nature reports that while support for innovation is being spruiked by both major parties, "broader questions of research funding have so far not come up in the campaign".

Preston Manning, a retired right-wing populist politician who graduated in economics slammed the political system last December for Canada's lack of a federal science department or ministry and the dearth of scientific or engineering training among its parliamentarians. Which ought to have a familiar ring in Australia.

It' will also be recalled that the Harper government abolished the office of the National Science Advisor earlier in the year, and Nature writes: "the committee that now advises the prime minister on matters of science is packed with industrial as well as scientific experts." Indeed, an increasing number of scientists are complaining about an undue emphasis on commercially focused research over long-term basic research.

Nature's editorial concludes:

[I]n Canada the problem [of excessive commercial focus] is compounded by the fact that the current government has channelled new science funds into four restrictive priority areas — natural resources, environment, health and information technology — and that scientists are often required to scrounge matching funds from elsewhere to top up their grants. Furthermore, the government this month defined sub-priority areas that mix in obvious commercial influences: alongside 'Arctic monitoring', for example, sits 'energy production from the oil sands'.

Just how Australia's Labor government is going to interpret the Cutler and Bradley reports and develop policy, particularly in the light of the global economic readjustments, will be a matter of concern.

Note this transcript of a September 9  interview on the ABC's Lateline Business:

GREG HOY: How important is it for Australia to get the goals right in innovation?
 

TERRY CUTLER: Hugely important because this goes to the heart of our future prosperity as a country. If you look at our scorecard around innovation for how we've been performing over the last decade or more, we've been falling further and further behind. And, the upshot of this is if we don't move to invest more aggressively in developing capability for the future as a company to make our firms more competitive in a global world, the standards of living in Australia are just going to decline.
 

GREG HOY: So what went wrong in Australia's national innovation system?
 

TERRY CUTLER: I think the - what went wrong is that we took our eye off the ball. And also, we focused only on half the playing field. We focused a lot on research and saying to universities they should commercialise, and we forgot things like innovation happens around the firm. It's what business does, business commercialises, and we need to promote a cadre of businesses in Australia who can take on the world's best.
 

GREG HOY: Your terms of reference asked you to develop a set of national innovation priorities; so what did you come up with?
 

TERRY CUTLER: First of all, focus on your strengths. I mean, Australia is a small economy in global terms; we're roughly two per cent of the world's innovation system. So we need to focus on what we can do best, and that means leveraging where we have natural advantages, like resource, agriculture and so forth. Secondly, we need to look at where we face major national challenges, which are also global challenges, and where the sort of solutions we might develop are going to be globally relevant and develop new industry opportunities. Thirdly, we need to look at where we can apply emerging technologies to reinvent the competitiveness of our existing industry base - that's a really important one. Fourthly, we need to internationalise our innovation system. And finally, we need to invest in developing the capability to support all of the above.
 

GREG HOY: Indeed, you've recommended a national innovation council be established, not yet another layer of bureaucracy?
 

TERRY CUTLER: The real problem is how you get a whole of government response and have government interface with industry on a whole of government basis. So that's what we're saying: we need a central coordinating point at the centre of government to provide that strategic direction, strategic assessment and leadership to sit over the whole system.
 

GREG HOY: On a subject, no doubt close to your heart, given you also wear a hat as board member for the CSIRO, are you proposing changes there?
 

TERRY CUTLER: Organisations like CSIRO and the other public research agencies I think have a role to mobilise the responses to major national challenges around things like climate change, water, salinity and so forth. And we've seen that developing, I think, very strongly in CSIRO through their national flagship program. And these public research agencies also play a key role in hosting major national facilities and developing those capabilities.
 

GREG HOY: Your report emphasises government investment in science and innovation has fallen by a quarter, the number of researchers has fallen despite surging revenues from the resources boom. So would your recommendations cost the Government more?
 

TERRY CUTLER: Yes. And the point here is that we shouldn't think about this as a cost, as expenditure. This is about investment to get a return. If we invest - and so the question is: are we investing enough now proportionate to the opportunities that we should be seizing and addressing? And I think the short answer is we're not. And if we invest now, we're talking about the future return from increased taxes, from an increasingly prosperous business community. So we've got to think about it in terms of that sort of equation.
 

GREG HOY: So how much more should the Government be spending?
 

TERRY CUTLER: Well, I would like to see step function increases in a whole lot of areas. But, we're all pragmatic and clearly this is not a matter for a one-off budget hit. The whole framework of this report is to say we need, as a country, a long-term commitment to investment. So, this report is framed around a 10 year view of where we need to head to. So, for example, how we double our investment in research and R&D over a 10 year period and so forth. How we move to being in the top quartile of our competitor countries.
 

GREG HOY: Dr Terry Cutler, thanks for joining Lateline Business.
 

TERRY CUTLER: It's a pleasure.