Editorial 18 June 2001

Toward a Knowledge Nation - But With Faltering Steps

The  Knowledge Nation has come in for a fair share of attention in recent days. First the journal Nature devoted a full page editorial to the concept  (June 7th). And then of course, with considerable fanfare, the leader of the Federal opposition, Kim Beazley, gave an address to the Sydney Institute at which he promulgated the sixty-six page report, The Comparative Performance of Australia as a Knowledge Nation, commissioned by Labor's Chifley Research Centre and written by three academics from Melbourne, Monash, and Victoria universities who submitted it this past April.

Nature's editorial focuses on biotechnology almost to the exclusion of any other concerns. After highlighting the $2.9 Billion five year initiative of "Backing Australia's Ability" announced at the end of January, which it assesses to be designed to "stimulate the commercialization of research discoveries,"  it singles out the $155 million segment to cover 50% of the costs of Major National Research Facilities (to date some 70 projects have been submitted for consideration). This is followed by two of the most cogent observations made by Nature's editorial:

But the Conservative (sic) federal government's investment is unlikely to propel Australia to the front line of the global biotechnology market. Most of the A$2.9 billion is slated for the final years of the programme.

[I]t is up to the scientific community and entrepreneurs, while making the most of government investments, to lobby to improve the universities, which have suffered considerably in recent years. If Australian biotechnology is to prosper in the long term, stronger support for universities, and perhaps also some high-profile success in biotechnology itself, will be necessary to enhance the currently low appeal of science to Australian students entering university.

Leaving aside for the moment that the a knowledgeable nation doesn't live by biotechnology alone, Nature doesn't exactly give "Backing Australia's Ability" a glowing endorsement.

We come now to Mr. Beazley, the Chifley Research Centre's Report and the Knowledge Nation. First it must be said that in his speech to the Sydney Institute on June 14th Mr. Beazley made the point that:

I should let you know that [the Chifley commissioned report] has been influential in the development of the final report of Labor's Knowledge Nation Task Force. We plan to launch that final report... in a few weeks' time.

The report will be nothing less than a ten-year agenda for establishing Australia as an effective Knowledge Nation. The report will give the Australian people a picture of where we want to take our nation, and how we propose to get there. 

Interestingly, although the report contains many tables and some charts all of which point to Australia's relative retrograde motion in education, research and development it adds little to the cogent graph published by the Group of Eight in April which is a damning indictment of Australia's expenditure on research and development for the past nine years. Furthermore, nowhere in his speech does Mr. Beazley refer to the Group's " December 2000 paper, Research and Innovation: Australia’s Future,  [which] argued that for Australia to remain competitive with OECD countries we would require an additional $13 billion over five years, made up of $4.2 billion from business, $6.75 billion from the Commonwealth and $2.7 billion from other non-Commonwealth sources." Why not? The answer may have come toward the end of the speech, 

In any case, the main legacy for an incoming government, in the short term, will be a fairly tight financial position. The government's panic-stricken spending spree will severely constrain the pace of our efforts, though not the direction, and certainly not the commitment.
    It will certainly take longer than one term of government to complete these reforms. This is a ten year agenda. What is important in our first term is that we make a real start.

Is the Rhodes Scholar and leader of the Opposition saying? "We'd do a grand job of creating a knowledgeable nation if we have the funds left over to us by the Coalition with which to do it." 

And here we might have come to believe that Mr. Beazley for these past five years or so had championed the view that we cannot afford not to achieve parity with our OECD cohort. Now it seems to be more a matter of we'll get something done, but not much in the short term, but we will get to it, really.

It's worth recalling that Craig Barrett the CEO of Intel recently announced an A$22.5 billion allocation for this fiscal year for infrastructure, research and development - downturn or no downturn. Perhaps his board and shareholders are easier to placate than the groups Mr. Beazley has to deal with,  which ultimately are the voters. Or our parliamentarians' perceptions of the voters? Many years ago Engine Charlie Wilson dropped the one-liner, "If it's good for General Motors, it's good for the country." Well if allocating A$22.5 billion for infrastructure, R&D is good for Intel during not the most salubrious of times, mightn't Australia's leaders at least seriously consider that investing in research and development and the infrastructure on which it depends ought to be of very high priority.

But perhaps we're being prematurely pessimistic and when the Report of Labor's Knowledge Nation Taskforce is made public we'll see that it's not only the cats of Australia that have more than a Hobson's choice.

Perhaps.

Alex Reisner
The Funneled Web