Nick Champion (Wakefield, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Assistant Minister for Manufacturing and Science) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to speak on the Australian Research Council Amendment Bill 2018, which the opposition will be supporting. This bill relates to the annual appropriations for the Australian Research Council and serves the purpose of applying the annual indexation, CPI, to the various grant programs that the council supports. These increases are already reflected in the budget and the MYEFO forward estimates, making this a largely administrative bill. The bill will amend legislative spending caps in the act to allow for additional investment in the Australian research grant schemes of up to $758 million for 2017-18 through to $771.93 million for 2019-20. As previously stated, this is already reflected in the budget.

Labor supports the updating of the funding profile for major Australian Research Council grant programs; however, this basic administrative change has previously been held up by the coalition's attempts to pass their very unfair and regressive $100,000 university degrees. When there's funding uncertainty, we know that there is a significant impact on the work of researchers. Professor Brian Schmidt, now vice-chancellor of the Australian National University, in 2015 opened his opinion piece on The Drum with the statement:

Funding uncertainty makes it much harder for Australia to attract and retain research talent. One story about a disappearing job very nearly put me off ever coming to this beautiful country.

Professor Schmidt went on to say:

To reap the benefits of science, society needs patience. While political change can rise and fall in a day, the circle of research and development runs on a multi-decadal timescale between when a discovery is made and when society directly benefits. It is for this reason that the single most important part of science and research policy is stability.

And yet, in my 20 years in Australia, I and other researchers in businesses, universities and government agencies have faced a continually changing landscape of short-term programs, strategies and political emphases. Uncertainty caused by this haphazard approach leads to huge inefficiency by stranding investments, making it impossible to strategically plan, and ultimately making Australia a less than preferred option for researchers from here and around the world. It's why clever Australians like evolutionary biologist Danielle Edwards are leaving their home country to work elsewhere.

Because science is so international, and so connected, stories like Danielle's spread fast and wide. They make it much harder to attract talent from the rest of the world, and retain the talent we have. A similar story very nearly put me off ever coming to this beautiful country: one of my great astronomy professors at Harvard accepted a position in Australia in 1975, but the position disappeared just before he was to arrive, when the Whitlam government fell. Nineteen years later, his experience still coloured my view, and became one of my principal concerns about emigrating to Australia. Fortunately I had an Australian wife who could reassure me—but for many people, the story of that bad experience would have been enough not to come.

They're the words of Professor Brian Schmidt, who won the 2011 Nobel prize for physics while researching in Australia. It makes one think about that bad experience in 1975 affecting the decision of a world-leading scientist to emigrate to Australia and raising doubt in his mind about the opportunities in Australia. The House should reflect on that experience, particularly when we discuss this bill, and we should acknowledge the importance of stability and of each side building on the progress of the other.

We know that one of the drivers of Australian success in research is a provision of both competitive grant funding programs by the ARC and the NHMRC and a long-term stable block grant that allows universities to invest strategically in research in ways that will foster its development. Research funded by the Australian Research Council allows Australian thinkers to produce outcomes that will help our country become more creative, productive, resilient and better equipped to face and understand the developments of the 21st century. We understand the value of the Australian Research Council and we understand what it has achieved for the nation when we properly fund science and research.

When we reflect on the time Labor was in government and the good investments that we made—such as a 10-year innovation strategy in 2008, Powering Ideas—we saw a series of positive objectives to increase the number of Australian research groups performing at world-class levels. We wanted to boost international research collaboration by Australian universities. We wanted to significantly increase the number of students completing higher degrees by research over this decade. We wanted to double the level of collaboration between Australian business, universities and publicly funded research agencies. And we wanted to increase the proportion of businesses engaging in innovation and continue the improvement in the number of businesses investing in research and development.

None of these things can come about without a government that is a tuned to the benefit that our nation gets from investing in science and research. Between 2007 and 2013, under Labor, expenditure on science and research increased by 49 per cent. For the House's benefit, that's $3.3 billion a year. We doubled the number of Australian postgraduate awards. We raised the stipend for the 10,000-plus researchers we supported. When a government fights for the big investments in science and research, the whole nation shares in the rewards—and sometimes the whole of humanity shares in those rewards. Government secured funding for the Square Kilometre Array—the biggest astronomy project of this generation and a multibillion-dollar international development in infrastructure.

Investing in world-class research across the country means we now have a state-of-the-art national marine research vessel, RV Investigator, which can accommodate up to 40 scientists and support staff, go to sea for 60 days at a time and cover 10,000 nautical miles. This vessel enables researchers to head out to the Pacific, Indian and Southern oceans to undertake deep sea oceanography—and that underpins resource exploration, monitors and better understands fisheries, and learns more about our weather patterns and large ocean processes. We now have a world-first carbon fibre production facility at Geelong. We now have two of the world's most advanced supercomputers. We have the world's most advanced biosecurity research facility.

Labor in government helped businesses invest in the future by replacing the hold R&D tax concession with a new tax credit. And we established Commercialisation Australia, giving 440 entrepreneurs their shot at success with over $185 million in grant support. This is very important support for business and particularly for manufacturers who rely on the R&D tax credit—which used to be a tax concession. We secured close to a billion dollars in funding for clean technology in manufacturing—cutting waste and the costs associated for business.

In 2013 the member for Port Adelaide and I visited a family business situated on the borders of our respective electorates. Mario Verasi runs a successful hydroponic farm and an extensive processing facility. He packs lettuce and other goods for other farms around the area and sells it on to supermarket chains to be consumed by customers in South Australia and around the country. He was successful in applying for a Clean Technology Food and Foundries Investment Program grant, and that provided assistance and funding for a 99-kilowatt solar system. The system reduced the carbon intensity of that business by 47 per cent and also provided the business with significant savings in energy costs. That story was replicated over and over again in my electorate, with businesses examining the amount of power they use and, helped by the government, adopting sensible ways of reducing their costs and, of course, their carbon footprint on the environment. Mario and his family have operated the business for over 35 years. They described the program as being good for businesses, good for the community and good for the environment. There are similar stories of success from businesses around Australia.

The recent budget saw the Australian Research Council Discovery Projects scheme, for basic or fundamental research funding, increased by only 0.3 per cent, and the linkage scheme, which is applied research, increased by 2.7 per cent in 2018-19. Under Labor, support for the Australian Research Council reached a high of $873 million in 2012-13. Under this bill, the support for ARC programs will be $758 million in 2018-19 and $771 million in 2019-20. The difference in funding is largely because this Liberal government has not continued funding programs for mid-level researchers, like the future fellowships, at previous levels. Under Labor, 200 fellowships were awarded in 2012, and yet now, in 2018, only 100 fellowships will be awarded. The coalition should reflect on the achievements made when investing in science and research and on their own record, like when they sought to cut over $900 million from science and research, including $75 million from the Australian Research Council, in their first budget.

Labor knows that economies and societies which invest more in research generally show faster rates of growth in output and in human development. In his address to the Australian Academy of Science last year, Bill Shorten recommitted Labor to our three per cent R&D target. He stated:

Our national goal should be to lift our investment in research and development—by government, by universities and by our private sector—and I suggest our goal should be moving the proportion of science expenditure to 3 per cent of our GDP by 2030.

What at times can be lost on those opposite is that these programs supported by the Australian Research Council serve as an integral part of the Australian innovation system, along with the National Health and Medical Research Council and other national institutions. The Australian Research Council is a major funder of our national competitive grants system.

Research helps foster our future. It helps foster progress, it helps foster economic growth and it helps breakthroughs in a range of different areas, and literally everybody wins out of that process. It's not something that you can say affects just one segment of the community. Breakthroughs in research and science really do ripple not just through one university; they ripple through suburbs, they ripple through hospitals and they ripple through scientific institutions. They are the great breakthroughs that help the whole country and, ultimately, help the whole of humanity. Research helps foster our future, and we understand, on this side of the House at least, that we have to help that process.

We have to provide stability and predictability—that's one of the reasons we are supporting this bill. As outlined in Professor Schmidt's article, that predictability and stability can have a great effect for the negative or for the positive. If there's one thing I'd urge the House to consider, it is to maintain that stability and maintain that predictability of funding of our support for these great national endeavours in science and research. I commend the bill to the House.

See this speech in context