Karen Andrews (McPherson, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

Can I start by thanking the member for Swan for putting forward this excellent motion, which gives us an opportunity to reach out across what is often a very divided place here and talk about things that are important to the future of Australia, so thank you very much for that.

Whilst I was listening to the member speak, it crossed my mind that there will come a day when I am no longer a politician, but I will always be an engineer. Often I laugh and say, 'Given the opportunity of introducing myself as a politician or an engineer, which one would I choose?' I generally choose 'engineer', given the opportunity. I do that for multiple reasons. But I'm very proud of the fact that I did study engineering—and that my elder sister is a graduate in agricultural science. She's got a master's in ag science and psychology—and multiple things, to be honest! She was a STEM professional who encouraged not only me but many other people to follow a STEM pathway.

The substance of this motion, in my view, is really talking about the opportunity for parliamentarians to engage with scientists. Of course, during this week we have the opportunity, as individuals and collectively, to meet with many great scientists. I would also encourage everyone here to do all that they can to take the opportunity to meet with the scientists and listen to what they are saying about the areas in which they have specialised. Some have incredibly deep knowledge that they have garnered over many, many years. We have an opportunity to learn from them and look at what the potential practical implications will be at the intersection between industry and science, which I will come back to.

The Deputy Prime Minister and I established Parliamentary Friends of Science well over 10 years ago now, and we have co-chaired it since that time. He and I have done all that we can, in a very bipartisan way, to encourage our colleagues to meet with scientists, to engage with science, to understand all that science can deliver for this country. I think that we would all agree that where we saw science most recently at its best was during the COVID pandemic, when, as a nation, we relied so heavily on so many scientists from so many backgrounds. I can remember taking the call from the minister for health at the time, Greg Hunt, when he said that we needed to manufacture invasive ventilators here. I remember him telling me that we needed 20,000 invasive ventilators—and, quite frankly, we weren't even sure that that was going to be enough at the start of the pandemic. But what happened was that our industrial specialists, our manufacturers, led by our scientists, came together to work out how they were going to make those ventilators here in Australia, and they achieved it. They delivered exactly what was asked of them. They basically started from scratch, because, as we would all remember, it was very difficult to get products in and out of this country. So it was almost a first-principles design from those scientists and engineers who were involved in building those ventilators. Then we saw the work that was being done more broadly across the health sector, with so many professionals stepping up to make sure that they did their very best to keep Australia as safe as they possibly could.

These are really very simple and perhaps topical examples of the interaction of science with our everyday lives. I think that it's incumbent upon all parliamentarians to ensure that they are supporting the various science agendas that have been put forward by successive governments. I thank the current government for the work that they're doing, and I would like to reflect, in the last minute or so that I have here today, on some of the work that was done under the coalition government to support science in our communities. The standout for me was probably the $1.1 billion National Innovation and Science Agenda. At the time it was quite groundbreaking in terms of what it was doing with industry, innovation and science, and in some of the work that was established there. Things such as crowdsourced equity funding legislation, the $200 million CSIRO Innovation Fund and tax incentives for early-stage investors actually were really positive things to do.

What I would hope is that over the coming years we all work together to make sure we build on the strengths of the past and we look forward to all that we can do to ensure that science has a key role in what we are doing here in this country.

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