Gary Gray (Brand, Australian Labor Party, Parliamentary Secretary for Regional Development and Northern Australia) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to speak in favour of the Australian Research Council Amendment Bill 2008. It amends the Australian Research Council Act to increase the funding limits in the special appropriation and insert new funding caps for the last year of the forward budget estimates. That is what we are formally doing here, but in reality what we are also doing is implementing a promise, a commitment made to Australians by the current Prime Minister, then opposition leader, on 14 November last year. One of the hallmarks of the new government is not just that throughout 2007 the opposition had thought carefully about what was needed to build our nation to the future but that now we are in government we are going about the process of building that nation.

It is important for a range of reasons. It is important because it is how we want to act; we do what we said we would do as a government and we do it well. I will just quote from the original statement that we made almost a year ago, following all of that consideration put in by the then shadow minister, Senator Carr, in the course of 2005, 2006 and 2007. The statement from the then opposition leader read:

A Rudd Labor Government will invest in new future Fellowshipsto keep Australia’s best and brightest mid-career researchers in Australia.

Federal Labor’s Future Fellowships program will offer four year Fellowships valued at $140,000 a year to 1,000 of Australia’s top researchers in the middle of their career.

In addition, each researcher’s institution would receive a $50,000 grant to support the purchase of related infrastructure and equipment for their research project.

It goes on, but that is the simple commitment that we made. Without reading the detail of that statement—and I am happy to table it for those who are interested—I will read now from a statement made by the minister on budget night implementing this policy promise. The statement reads:

The Rudd Labor Government today delivered on its election commitment of funding of $326 million over four years to create a Future Fellowships scheme for top mid-career researchers.

The scheme will offer 1,000 talented Australian and international mid-career researchers four-year fellowships of up to $140,000 a year. Host organisations will receive up to an additional $50,000 a year to support related infrastructure and equipment for research projects.

The outstanding work conducted by our best and brightest is the foundation stone upon which Australia is building a first-class, internationally competitive national innovation system.

The remarkably identical nature of the promise and its delivery is the hallmark of a government that does what it said it would do.

The importance of the science agenda to our nation has always been obvious. It has been obvious in our education and in our economy. For my generation, science has played a particularly important role, not just in the obvious area of health care but in the less obvious areas of inspiration. Throughout the 1960s we all grew up against the backdrop of the space race, of the attempts to land on the moon, of the technology that grew from the international collaborative efforts of like-minded nations and competitive efforts of not-like-minded nations to understand, interpret and grow the collective wisdom of mankind from the study of outer space. It was inspirational.

Last week in Europe a massive experiment was commenced with the turning on of the Hadron Collider. My eldest boy is 12. The interest he took in the television coverage of that special scientific event is heartening, and the education that took place in our schools around that event is inspiring. But, most importantly, it brings home to our kids, to the next generation, that the pursuit of science is not only important in itself but also underpins the essential parts of our industry and supports our living standards for the future.

In this bill, we commit $942.9 million over four years. As I said, it is an election commitment fulfilled. It is an election commitment that fits into the four pillars of the current government’s education revolution. We have early intervention in education to support the needs of young kids, especially young kids at risk. We have the digital education revolution. All of us in this place have had the opportunity to be in high schools at the moment that the principals receive computers, and we have seen on the faces of the kids in the schools in our electorates the passion about and the embracing of this great investment in technology and in the future of education for our kids.

We have a massive program through our TAFEs in training the workforce to meet the skills challenges of the future. In my electorate of Brand, which encompasses the Kwinana industrial precinct, we can see a future where up to 40 per cent of our current workforce will retire in no more than four to five years. In six or seven years, the current workforce will have seen a 50 per cent reduction in its current numbers. Less than four per cent of our current workforce are aged under 24. Training forms an important part of our education revolution, but this particular bill relates to research and research in universities.

Prior to coming into parliament, I spent a year as an executive director of the Western Australian Institute for Medical Research. In that role, it became apparent to me what great gains could be made out of medical research. Importantly, I noted some of the very good things that were being done by Michael Wooldridge, the then Minister for Health. Minister Wooldridge put in place significant investment in medical research and created what he referred to as a ‘virtuous cycle’ to put major medical research into public hospitals to create a health benefit that was more significant than almost any other direct investment that could have been made in modern medicine in our public health system.

The equation went as simply as this: people involved in public health will, when exposed to the best possible science, lift their game. It means our doctors are exposed to better ideas. It means our nurses and our hospital administrators are more alert to scientific method. It creates a linkage between medical research and, most importantly, science based, evidence based medicine in our public hospitals. It is a legacy that Michael Wooldridge left to our nation through his occupancy of the health portfolio throughout those years in the late 1990s. It is a legacy that stands our public hospitals around the nation in good stead.

We have seen since that time the massive growth of the medical research community in Queensland. Throughout the middle to late 1990s, former Premier Kennett in Victoria built a significant foundation of medical research off the back of existing institutions such as the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute in Melbourne. It may sound surprising that there is such a history and tradition in the last 20 years or so of support for science research. It is unfortunate that, in the course of the last five to seven years, science grants and research funding from the former Howard government in its latter years became hopelessly politically tainted. It is a reality that many of the secure principles that underpinned the initiatives of the Kennett government and of Michael Wooldridge as health minister became polluted by political interference in science research through the last five to seven years.

This bill understands the importance of proper process, it understands the importance of peer review in creating excellent science, and it understands the importance of transparency in decision making around what good science is going to be funded. As we look forward over the next five or 10 years, Australia stands poised to make significant research investments in tropical science, an area where we can lead the world. In Western Australia there is a magnificent bid for a radio telescope that has the capacity not just to explore the far reaches of the universe but also to build an industry—a high-end science research based industry—around a magnificent piece of infrastructure that we all hope will actually be put in place. Importantly, there are massive investments that we can make in horticulture, in agricultural science and in social sciences.

But, as we look at the ways in which our nation will make those investments, we need also to be aware that nations in our region are actually investing more than we do at this moment and more, even, than this bill will commit. Not even our $11 billion Education Investment Fund, which currently is at risk as the opposition parties in the Senate go about whittling it away, will put us on the same stage as nations to our north. In the course of the last 15 years, the Chinese economic miracle has been driven by a number of factors: human ingenuity, a capacity to capture resources, a willingness to educate the population and an understanding that investment in science is what drives good education and good industrial policy.

I come from the state of Western Australia. Our agricultural dominance is that we create the nation’s export grain crop. We have done that on the basis of outstanding agricultural science, understanding what trace elements need to be added to our otherwise ancient and arid soils. That research has created a situation where this year our grain crop will probably top 10 million tonnes in a year that has seen indifferent, variable and scant rainfalls through our critical wheat belt. It is important to remember that the wheat belt in Western Australia has grown on the back of agricultural science and has grown to a dominant position from a period at the start of the last century where our farmers literally died of starvation because of a lack of understanding of what trace elements were needed to be added to our soils. If we fast-forward to the first decade of the current century, we see the Western Australian grain belt leading the nation in its productivity, its application of scientific method and its prospects for the future.

Science in Western Australia goes even further than agriculture. We have all seen in recent years the celebration over our own Western Australian scientific Nobel laureates. The discovery of the heliobacter at Royal Perth Hospital in the mid-1980s created a scientific understanding of how ulcers were formed and how to treat and get rid of the problem of ulcers. At the time, in the early 1980s, it was generally accepted that, if you were a sedentary person, if you were aged over 40, if you had stress in your life, that is why you got ulcers. Barry Marshall and his team discovered that in fact the heliobacter created the ulcerous condition, and treatment of the heliobacter could easily remove the ulcers, in the main in the stomach and throat regions of the body.

That research was done in a public hospital, with very little public funding. It was done against a prevailing view that said the research was nonsense. It was done in an environment where research was not peer reviewed, where grants were not transparently given and where, in effect, a mates system was in place. Australian science is better than that, and this bill aspires to and creates the preconditions to make our science better than that. This bill is therefore about good science.

The bill is also about saying what you mean and doing what you say. Throughout 2005 and 2006, then Shadow Minister Kim Carr made clear that he wanted a better research environment, a better funded research environment and therefore better outcomes. It is important that in this place we acknowledge the great work of ministers of the past—and I have done that by mentioning the work of Michael Wooldridge—but it is important also as we look to the future to understand that, in science, transparency and funding go hand in hand. It is also important that we know, recognise and understand that the threats to the $11 billion Education Investment Fund, also created in the federal budget, are serious threats. Not just are they threats about politics; they are threats to our capacity to meet the world as we need to meet it and to build an environment in our schools, in our universities and in our research centres that allows us to grow, to obtain benefits for our lifestyles and to obtain benefits for our economy from outstanding research. I commend this bill to the House.

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