Science Policy in the Election of 2007 --Peter Pockley Reports. (October 4, 2007)

Yesterday on the ABC's Science Show Robyn William's invited the doyen of Australia's science journalists, Peter Pockley, to give his assessment of where science fits in the proclamation of the science policies of Australia's political parties as they manoeuvre to gain or retain power.

If Dr Pockley's assessment is anywhere near the mark, and you believe that the welfare of the nation depends in significant measure on the health of Australian science, and most especially the enabling sciences, you are going to be depressed.

You can download the MP3 file which contains Dr Pockley's 6½ minute segment from http://mpegmedia.abc.net.au/rn/podcast/current/audioonly/ssw_20071103.mp3 

or listen at http://www.abc.net.au/cgi-bin/common/player_launch.pl?s=rn/scienceshow&d=rn/scienceshow/audio&r=ssw_03112007_2856.ram&w=ssw_03112007_28M.asx&t=3%20November%202007&p=1.

The segment starts 8'30" into the file.

Transcript --  with thanks to The Science Show on ABC Radio National.

This transcript was typed from a recording of the program. The ABC cannot guarantee its complete accuracy because of the possibility of mishearing and occasional difficulty in identifying speakers.

Peter Pockley: Looking over the major political issues of the past year, you'd have to conclude that science has played a crucial role in informing decision-makers and the electorate at large. Sustained coverage in the media reflected heightened interest in scientific evidence and advice on matters like climate change, alternative energy, nuclear power and medical research involving stem cells, not to mention the Tasmanian pulp mill.

Science has provided the backbone of debates now raging in the election campaign. But here's the rub; halfway into the official campaign, science itself has scored nary a mention, even in passing from the major parties, let alone commitments comparable to the billions of dollars of value that science brings to the nation. Mainstream media frantically tried to get more than five-second grabs from the leaders on their managed issue of the day but they failed to open agendas about manifest vacuums in policy, like science.

So what's going on here? There's no lack of hard information to inform a debate about past performance in supporting scientific research and promises for the future. A good starting point would be the featured editorial in the September 21st issue (requires subscription) of the top international journal Science, headlined 'A critical vote down under'. Science analyst and president of the Australian Conservation Foundation Professor Ian Lowe catalogued the coalition government's record from its swingeing cuts to science and universities in its first budget in 1996. Nothing like this has been published in the Australian media. The Howard years, Lowe concluded, have been gloomy for public interest research.

Bodies representing scientific and academic interests have issued wish lists for policies, but there's been no concerted push to attract public attention. In the absence of champions of science prepared to go head to head in public, as some persistent souls did when climate change was politically unpopular, scientists seem to accept, tacitly, that there are no votes in science.

We should acknowledge though that the Howard government has listened to the canny lobbyists from the medical research community. The coalition has significantly increased funding for medical research in a couple of bursts and is promising more in this election. While doing this however, they've neglected the crying need for equivalent levels of support for the enabling sciences of physics, chemistry, mathematics, entomology, taxonomy and the like. Medical and environmental research, including on climate change, would wilt without a steady flow of expertise and solid career prospects in these less glamorous disciplines, yet the government increased HECS fees for science courses.

Only now is it recognising that there has been a mounting and massive shortfall in scientists and engineers graduating from universities, a skills deficit that won't be fixed through new technical colleges. Perhaps then the politicians can be excused for not perceiving any political constituency in science. Unlike the USA where the siting of major scientific facilities becomes a political football, there are no Australian electorates with a concentration of scientists and research institutions big enough to comprise a potential block of votes to woo. Possible exceptions are the Canberra and rural electorates with regional universities, but none is marginal enough to warrant special attention.

To give them credit, the government eventually realised the damage to national capability in science from its cuts from 1996 and generated a so-called boost to funding in the election year of 2001 with its awkwardly named package Backing Australia's Ability or BAA. The exercise was repeated in the next election year of 2004 with BAA mark two. Superficially these sounded impressive until analysis showed that they amounted to little more than stemming the decline in Australia's funding relative to gross domestic product, the accepted international benchmark.

The coalition also invested $359 million in a new nuclear reactor, Australia's largest commitment to a science based facility. The cost was justified publicly on grounds of 'saving lives through nuclear medicine'. But it's been an embarrassment for the reactor to be shut down soon after its official opening due to faulty equipment. Meanwhile the supply of medical radio isotopes has been maintained independently of the reactor with imports from overseas, previously deemed impossible or uneconomic.

The May 2007 budget claimed record funding for science, but the increase was so small, even incorporating the two BAAs, that government support of R&D, as a proportion of the growing gross domestic product (that is, its relative importance in economic priorities), declined over the previous year. The Labor Party settled the science policy at its national conference in April and its main elements must come out sometime, albeit with minimal impact in the campaign.

Labor's main platform is an attempt to boost industrial productivity through enhancing innovation based on science. To focus this, the science branch would be transferred from the education portfolio back to its old home in industry with a new name. Labor would offer relief on the HECS burden for science and mathematics students, and the post of Chief Scientist would be returned from a half to a fulltime commitment.

Whereas the government has spent large sums on introducing a bureaucratic and detailed system for assessing where to place its funding for research (this is the contentious Research Quality Framework), Labor would dilute this propensity of the coalition for controlling institutions like universities by abolishing the framework before it is implemented next year. But will the voters care?

Robyn Williams: And we'll soon find out. Peter Pockley writes for the Australasian Science magazine.