It is Increasingly Difficult to Get the Ear of Government. -- AAS President Suzanne Cory. (September 20, 2012)

TWAS, the academy of sciences for the developing world, is an autonomous international organization, founded in 1983 in Trieste, Italy, by a distinguished group of scientists from the South under the leadership of the late Nobel laureate Abdus Salam of Pakistan. It was officially launched by the secretary-general of the United Nations in 1985.

TWAS's 12^th General Conference opened in Tianjin, China on September 18, 2012. At 6:30 pm that evening the president of the Australian Academy of Science, Suzanne Cory, spoke for 10 minutes on: The role of the Australian Academy of Science in promoting innovation through science policy.

Part of her comments as reported by The Australian's Jill Rowbotham:

In the early years of the academy's history, there was a high level of cooperation between scientists, engineers and government in Australia. Since that time, however, the increasing pace of social change has made it increasingly difficult to get the ear of government. The popular media, professional lobbyists and noisy interest groups now make many claims upon governments, irrespective of their logical or empirical veracity.

Over the last 15 or so years, the Australian government has gradually responded to the noise and increasingly accommodated such claimants. This has had the unfortunate effect of diminishing government regard for science as its primary source of reliable knowledge or even as a primary means to address major national challenges. [The challenge is to] foster better dialogue and mutual understanding between scientists, public servants and politicians... To us, scientific method should not need to be so constantly and basically defended. The reality is that it does. To the majority of people, science is a mystery -- and the advancement of technology, driven by science, exacerbates this sentiment.

Professor Cory told the conference that the Academy has stepped up efforts to explain science to a wider community that was too often "ignorant or even antagonistic to science and innovation''.