Richard Marles (Corio, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Defence) Share this | Hansard source

This year we have celebrated the 50th anniversary of the moon landing and the voyage of Apollo11. It was one of the great scientific technical achievements of humanity. It was at the time, and indeed now, celebrated in popular culture and in the media on the front pages of our newspapers. It was impossible watching at the time—and as we relive it 50 years later—the incredible journey of Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins and those first steps taken without being completely enraptured about the power of human curiosity, the interest and magnetism of science, and the desire to be a part of it. In the aftermath of Apollo 11, people studied science around the world in unparalleled numbers. Indeed, in Australia, if you take year 10, the moment at which a student chooses for the first time to study science as a voluntary act, 1982 represented the peak of the graph of kids deciding to pursue science in the proportion of people who made that choice. It was the year in which I made that choice and went on to pursue a science degree. There is no doubt that, whilst I can't remember the Apollo 11 landing, the sceptre of Apollo 11 loomed large in my mind as being one of the great things which encouraged me to pursue an academic career in science. Since then, though, that is a stat which has been on the decline across governments of all persuasions, leading to a point now where encouraging kids to study science is actually a matter of national urgency.

It has been a tenet of my life that Australia has been on the cutting edge of modernity, but, if you look at the statistics today, you see that there are other nations around the world that are embracing the study of science and the pursuit of it in a way that we are not. Today, 18 per cent of degrees awarded in Australia are in STEM. In Sweden, that number is 28 per cent. In South Korea, it's 32 per cent. Compared to that remarkable event back in 1969 where Australia actually played a very significant part in it occurring, today there is a risk that, unless we change our cultural relationship to science, we are at the risk of being left behind.

It seems to me that part of that lies in a celebration of big science, and we have big science in this country to celebrate. The Square Kilometre Array telescope, which is based in South Africa and here in Murchison in Western Australia, probably represents the biggest science project in the world today. It will illuminate our view of the universe in ways that we have never before experienced. Those who are working on it talk about the fact that the Square Kilometre Array will be able to identify planets with biomarkers in different distant parts of the universe—indications that on those places there is life. Think about that: within the next decade, there is the real prospect that that will occur, which in that moment will be a profound incident in the human experience, and yet where do we read about that on the front page of our newspapers? The fact is that we simply don't. We read about everything else, but a celebration of big science in a way which encourages kids to pursue it is not happening, and it is a prime example of how we need to change that cultural relationship to science.

It's in that context that National Science Week is actually a really important week. More than 2,000 events occurred during August encouraging kids to explore the wonder of science. We do have some wonderful institutions in Australia around science outreach—Questacon being the most significant. In its field, scientific outreach to kids, Questacon is world class. It had more than half a million visitors last year, almost 150,000 of whom were students and another 50,000 of whom were teachers. It runs programs across the country. We can actually do this when we put our mind to it, but the need for Australia to change its cultural relationship to science is absolutely paramount.

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