News & Views item - August 2007

 

 

Australian American Leadership Dialogue Told by US IT Leader Australia Risks Being Left Far Behind International Competitors in Business, Education and the Arts. (August 20, 2007)

    The keynote address at the Australian American Leadership Dialogue in Melbourne this weekend was given by Larry Smarr, Professor of Computer Science and Information Technologies at the University of California, San Diego.

    While the Federal Coalition, Federal Labor and Australia's IT purveyors are trading insults and sound bites UCSD's Professor Smarr, the founding director of the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology, told his listeners that it's past time that Australia got its act together.

 

According to Professor Smarr we need to invest more in our universities to ensure we have the people and the knowledge to stay in front in a highly competitive game: "The world can move at a speed that is breathtaking. If you are not committed to maintaining that speed yourself and you begin to fall behind, it can become essentially impossible to catch up.

 

"I look at the kind of turmoil in the financial markets we have this week, issues of climate change, the avian flu virus, international security. These things have all become global. There's nothing that can be solved any more in a single country. This is the new world we're about to enter," and he urged that Australia needs to invest in this new technology to ensure it maintains its high standard of living, which is his view is not being done.

"What we've learned in California is that the universities are absolutely the most critical element of the innovation economy."

 

Then referring to Australia's predicted shortfall in trained scientists, mathematicians and engineers he said:   "The level of innovation that goes on in universities is quite striking and taking those innovations into the marketplace and create new companies and new values is what has driven Silicon Valley, and the biotech revolution.  In Australia the universities are not at [the required] level … that's one of your most important challenges."

 

But is Professor Smarr just Talking to the Hand?