Andrew Southcott (Boothby, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I was very pleased on Monday to go to the announcement of the projects for research infrastructure under the NCRIS. This is a scheme which is provided for under the Howard government’s Backing Australia’s Ability. What it does is provide critical infrastructure in a number of areas where Australia has an outstanding research track record. The projects are decided by a committee of eminent scientists. I was particularly pleased that there was $15 million for a plant accelerator which will be at the Waite Institute in the electorate of Boothby.

I am told that this facility will enable them to find out much more quickly which crops are salt resistant and which crops are drought resistant. It is a high-tech piece of infrastructure which is much more discriminating than the naked eye and allows us to find, to a much greater degree of sensitivity, the best crops. It is also known as a plant phenomics facility. Phenomics is the expression of the genome and very important in areas like salt research, salt resistance and drought resistance. It comes on top of a number of other projects that have also been built at the Waite Institute. Four years ago there was $40 million for the Australian Centre for Plant Functional Genomics, and presently I am working with the Winemakers Federation to establish a wine industry cluster on this campus.

The Waite Institute, as I have said before, is Australia’s pre-eminent agricultural research institute and one of the top two or three in the world. It sometimes comes as a surprise to people from interstate that our top agricultural research institute is housed in suburban Adelaide, but the reason for this was a bequest from a gentleman called Peter Waite, who in the 1920s donated his land to the University of Adelaide. At present it is very much what would be described as a cluster, with the CSIRO, the wine industry, the University of Adelaide and other things there like, as I have mentioned, the Australian Centre for Plant Functional Genomics. This plant accelerator will be a massive greenhouse—something like 4,000 square metres. That is a 40-metre by 100-metre greenhouse.

I would like to pay tribute to those people who have put together this bid: Professor Mike Tester, Nick Begakis from the Australian Centre for Plant Functional Genomics, and the director of the Waite Institute, Professor Geoff Fincher. It is an outstanding piece of infrastructure and it is one of the benefits of having good economic management. Budget surpluses have enabled us to do things like Backing Australia’s Ability to provide infrastructure for our scientists, especially in an area like agriculture, where we have such a strong competitive advantage. We need excellent scientists. We need to be able to attract the best scientists in order to sustain our competitive advantage in this area.