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Saturday’s election was a refreshing example of how Australian democracy can unleash power akin to a huge purgative natural force. It is tempting to liken it to the comet which took out the dinosaurs and left the landscape clear for the mammals to take over, but Coalition and Labor politicians are not so much of different species as different tribes. It’s more like a cyclone in Bangladesh or an earthquake in Chile destroying the main house in a village where most of its leaders were sheltering because they thought it was the safest place to be. But they had been in power so long that they had forgotten that it was built under the dodgy approvals system they inherited and maintained.
Anyway, jubilant survivors are coming down from the hills to take control until the next natural disaster. What will this mean for Australia’s research and innovation sector?
Long-battling Senator Kim Carr’s title as shadow minister has proven to be a true guide to his future, with Rudd appointing him as Minister for Industry, Innovation, Science & Research – get used to DIISR as a new departmental acronym.
There’s a bit of back to the future in this. Put simply, the Education portfolio will lose its Science responsibilities which will shift over to the Industry portfolio which will have been relieved of its Tourism and Resources roles. There will be compromises – for instance, will the National Health and Medical Research Council remain in Health or be taken into the new portfolio – but these chunky agency reshuffles are never perfect.
Carr, whose roots are in the Victorian left, will have to reconstruct himself to still be there at the next election. He will particularly have to leaven his proclivity for old-fashioned industry protection if he wants to deal effectively with the marketmeisters in Treasury and Finance.
Labor has also promised to make the Chief Scientist’s position a full time job. This will indeed be a red letter day at the S&T farm. The role can also be expected to expand in influence, following the UK example where the Chief Scientist has a staff of close to 200 people and an active role in coordinating the development and implementation of policy across all portfolios.
This will need a clever and energetic person at the helm with diplomatic skills and the ability to win and retain the confidence of Prime Minister Rudd as well as the portfolio minister. Professor Jim Peacock, whose two-year appointment to the part time role expires in February next year, is unlikely to be a candidate.
The Research Quality Framework is dead, long live “an internationally recognised, metrics-based research quality assurance system”, which is what Labor promised in its place. The level of concern aroused by the RQF was highlighted in September when the Academy of Science was stirred to refer to it as “an increasingly complex assessment exercise that invites inefficient and expensive game-playing”.
The many people in universities and other research institutions who have laboured over the years since then Minister Brendan Nelson spawned the RQF process will most likely be more relieved than resentful for the time and energy they have wasted. Some of their work may inform the process the new Government will institute to rate research, but this, like its predecessor, will be a fraught mission as it seeks to impose static bureaucratic and return-on-investment templates on what is essentially a creative and dynamic endeavour.
Labor’s promise to provide 1000 Future Fellowships to mid-career researchers is perhaps the most popular of its proposals. Bradley Smith, Executive Director of the Federation of Australian Scientific and Technological Societies, says it “will have a positive impact” and the Academy of Science has specifically welcomed it, along with Labor’s plan to double the number of Postgraduate Awards by 2012.
The Future Fellowships will provide $140,000 a year for four years, plus $50,000 to each researcher’s institution. Most of the $175 million Labor has allocated to this policy is projected to be spent in 2008-09 and 2009-10, running nicely up to the next election. But as $140,000 a year multiplied by 1000 equals $140 million, it seems that the full quota will be nowhere near filled by then.
The Future Fellowships and the expanded postgraduate awards program were amongst a swag of policies Labor submitted to Finance for costing on Tuesday November 20, four days before the election.
The next day it submitted another 89, including its policies for Mandatory Renewable Energy Targets, “ANSTO Graduates and research savings”, Green Loans, a Clean Energy Strategy, and its “$4.7 billion” National Broadband Network, to name just a few involving science and technology. Indeed, the last policy it submitted for costing, on the Thursday before the election, was its proposal to build “Enterprise Connect Innovation Centres” around the country.
That day, the secretary of Finance, Ian Watt, issued a press release listing these and many others, saying: “As these requests were received after Thursday 15 November 2007, Finance was unable to satisfactorily complete the costings prior to the election.”
As noted before, the new rulers in the village after Saturday’s natural democratic cataclysm are from a different tribe, not a new species.
Simon Grose is Canberra Correspondent for Science Media.
Editor's Note: An earlier version of this article was published in The Canberra Times. For permission to reproduce this article please contact Simon Grose.
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