Opinion - 15 November 2002

 

Australian Science and the Maelstrom

 

Peter Hall* comments on the Sydney Morning Herald's recognition of the plight of the enabling sciences in Australia and expands on its consequences.

As the Sydney Morning Herald's editorial of November 14th rightly implies, the government is not thinking wisely, or with an eye to the future, about how it spends its education dollars. Already foreign companies are shelving plans to invest in Australia because our universities cannot produce the trained workforce that their investment would require. For example, one reason some US companies are not setting up R&D facilities here is that we are not training the mathematical scientists they need.

In the real world, the process that connects education and employment works like this: a nation invests in higher education, and then, confident that the system is working effectively, employers invest in high-return activities that utilise a well-trained workforce. In the Federal Government's world, however, it's the other way around: private capital is invested in technology, and later, motivated by jobs that have become available, students flock to universities (paying much of the cost themselves) so that they might be trained in an appropriate field. Unfortunately, Business does not do all its business this way around.

But how would you ever know there was a problem, if the only data that informed you were the numbers of students doing courses in different fields? In Australia, we are locked into an downhill spiral: if the jobs aren't there then the students won't do the courses, and because the students don't do the courses then there's no motivation to invest and create the jobs.

Newcastle University physicist John O'Connor is right: this spiral is indeed condemning us to "a never-ending fate of catch-up with more enlightened countries." The spiral is already negatively affecting Australia's economy. We cannot even produce the graduates in the enabling sciences, such as mathematics, that employers demand; even less can our universities' run-down enabling science departments help to train basic biomedical researchers, applied scientists and engineers.

The SMH editorial rightly draws attention to the pivotal role that the enabling sciences play in ensuring Australia's security. It calls to mind a short article by General William Odom (US Army, Ret.), published only this past September, which reads in part:

While serving as the director of the National Security Agency, I realized that world-class mathematicians devoted to cryptology and cryptanalysis were critical for success. I was even more fascinated when I was made aware that continuing advances in mathematics are no less critical to breakthroughs in all of science and technology.1

As the SMH points out, nothing  "will expand the economy anything like...science and technology.'' And nothing fuels science and technology like the enabling sciences.
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1. Odom, W.E. (2002). Sustaining the momentum. Notices of the American Mathematical Society, vol. 49 (8), p. 885.


*Peter Hall is Professor of Statistics, the Australian National University and Chair of the National Committee for Mathematical Sciences.