News & Views item - August 2010

 

 

Nature Does a Whip-Around of Opinion Regarding Australia's Indecisive Federal Election. (August 24, 2010)

NatureNews' Stephen Pincock got the short straw to seek out some opinions from Australia's scientific community regarding the outcome, such as it is, of Saturday's federal election.

 

Glenn Albrecht, director of the Institute of Sustainability and Technology Policy at Murdoch University in Perth would like to believe: "Australians are telling their parties that they take climate change seriously and they take the science seriously," as demonstrated by the increase in the vote for the Greens".

 

Bob Williamson, the Australian Academy of Science's secretary for science policy commented: "We certainly hope that the Greens will be making action on climate change a major point during the next term of parliament now that they have improved their power, they have an opportunity to do so," and added, "I think that everyone has been disappointed by the absence of policy in this election campaign; one might have hoped that the more radical parties — Labor and the Greens — would have made more time for science during the campaign."

 

"I don't think this was the election campaign for science," Anna-Maria Arabia, executive director of the Federation of Australian Scientific and Technological Societies told NatureNews, "What was missing was any vision for the future of science and science funding."

 

According to Nobel laureate and immunologist Peter Doherty: "The only agenda that had to do with science at this election was climate change," but went on to point out to NatureNews that the parties differ in their support for universities. The Rudd-Gillard government raised research funding, especially to universities, by 34%. "The [previous] Howard government was simply hostile to the public universities, and Abbott admires Howard."

 

In an attempt to sound an optimistic note Mr Pincock ends by reporting that Professor Doherty welcomed the suggestion by the Liberal-National Coalition that it would consider giving more independence to the Chief Scientist.

 

 However, just what that would entail remains a mystery.

 

And Ms Arabia concluded: "There's no doubt that we would like to see the parties consult the scientific community on climate change. I'd like to think that whoever ends up in power would be willing to recognize the science on this issue."

 

We live in hope.