Dennis Jensen (Tangney, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

The crumbling of the Soviet Union and the rest of the Eastern bloc almost 20 years ago would deliver a peace dividend to the West, we were told—and, to an extent, it did. But we were also fooled, lulled into a false sense of security. Sure, it allowed us to initially slash defence expenditure, but that also reduced our military capabilities and, perhaps most importantly, led to a malaise in the West which continues today. Scientific research has stagnated, military and intelligence services have been found lacking, and now we are in the grip of a global financial crisis. We in the West almost appear to be wandering aimlessly, wondering what to do next.

What caused me to think about these issues was work that I have been doing on both anthropogenic global warming—or climate change, in the current politically correct parlance; I will just call it AGW—and the planned purchase of the new Joint Strike Fighter, or JSF, for Australia, two issues being driven by appeals to authority rather than critical examination of data and evidence. Proponents of both seem to have a form of institutionalised groupthink, an attempt to counter criticism by attacking the critics rather than addressing the substance of their concerns and criticisms.

The end of the Cold War caused a loss of focus on what we believe in and stand for. There was no longer any clearly defined threat and no clearly defined goal. The war on terror provided a different kind of challenge, and the global warming debacle has more to do with religion than science, but these have also failed to give the West a common focus. As a result, the West has effectively become rudderless—no pun intended—and priority for research and development and defence expenditure has been lost.

Why is this bad? Because much of the blue-sky research and development that in the past came about as a result of defence funding has been virtually eliminated. As a result, the hard sciences and mathematics withered on the vine, with decreasing funding bases and hence reduced interest from the most capable students. Why would our best and brightest want to struggle away with a hand-to-mouth existence when they could have security and a well-paid future elsewhere? So, in a time of often ill-directed policy and increased funding of universities, the numbers of students entering the hard sciences and mathematics have decreased in both real and relative terms. At the same time, the numbers enrolling in soft sciences and humanities have increased significantly. It is important to note that the skills used in the hard sciences, such as physics and chemistry, are somewhat different to those in the soft biological and life sciences but far more so to those in the humanities, and the net result has been a deskilling of our nations in science and technology.

When President Bush in 2004 proposed returning to the moon, he stated that it should be achieved by 2020, a period of 16 years. This is staggering. It is twice as long as was required for the Apollo moon landings from the first human being flying in space—and we had done it before. Worse, the effort has now been abandoned. The F15 Eagle fighter was in service about five years after McDonnell Douglas won the contract. By way of contrast, it will take Lockheed Martin more than 15 years for the JSF to become operational—and the F15, by the standards of the day, was the more technically difficult achievement.

Another disturbing feature we see in the West today is risk aversion. Mistakes and risks cannot be tolerated, so we end up with slow, incremental advance. This is another part of the protracted nature of so much development occurring now. The critical thinking skills required for so many technical and scientific decisions are no longer as widespread as they once were—a result of the diminishing numbers trained in the hard sciences and maths. More and more of these decisions are based upon non-science-based thinking, where justification of a point of view takes precedence over a decision based on hard evidence. The slide in the numbers and capability of those in the technical areas needs to be addressed as a matter of urgency; otherwise we will end up with a plethora of decisions based on an accepted paradigm rather than hard data and evidence. This will result in bad decisions which will affect people’s livelihood and welfare.

We see abundant evidence of this with the Rudd government’s so-called policymaking. It is interesting that the policies outlined for Australia’s long-term benefit are, from a realistic government legislation perspective, out in the never-never world of 2020 or 2050. Policies that are actually introduced to the parliamentary legislative agenda are very obviously focus group driven and they are not even focused on views that people may have a year or so in the future but on the here and now. As a result, we have decisions such as the CPRS and the mining supertax, which would have been easy to sell in the context of focus groups but are policies that are unable to withstand the scrutiny of the opposition and others.

With the ETS, people like the idea, in the abstract, of saving the planet, but when they realise it will cost them real money, they want real evidence. I have been saying this for years. It is plainly obvious to anyone with any ability for critical thinking, but it has clearly eluded many of the government members. The members opposite that know this whole AGW issue for the bunkum it is have, to their enormous discredit, simply gone along with their party line for fear of the punishment that would be meted out by their party. They had no hard fought policy debate within their party as we had in ours. That is why Labor decision making is so poor. The gang of four hands down the edicts from on high and the rest of the Labor Party must simply go along with it subserviently. It is a travesty for our democracy to think that the collective wisdom of a parliamentary party, which should be around 130 members and senators on the government side, is seen to reside in the minds of a mere four people. It is shameful.

With the mining supertax, you once again have short-term policymaking without adequate thought, evaluation or assessment. This is a simple case of politics of envy introduced by the gang of four. They dreamed up this scheme and were convinced that they would be able to sell it to the electorate by telling them that the big, rich, billionaire miners should pay more tax. After all, the government did create a simply enormous, massive deficit that it would have to repay. ‘No more tax burden for the average taxpayer’ was the focus-group-driven analysis—‘No, just those dirty rich miners’. So the tax was sneaked into the budget with absolutely no initial view to consult. Any reasonable approach would have included consultation from the outset and certainly prior to the budget. Suddenly reality struck, with the true situation becoming apparent and people becoming aware this would have a massive negative effect on the nation’s finances. The government is in damage control and has run out of its backflip budget.

This highlights the need for a greater emphasis on analytical skills and increased training of people in hard science and mathematics so that decisions in all areas, including government policymaking, are made analytically. We need people trained to appreciate the situation, not situate the appreciation! As such, it is necessary to return to the fundamentals in many of these areas and realise, as President Kennedy said in the 1960s when committing the US to a manned lunar landing that decade:

… we do these and other things not because they are easy, but because they are hard.

We need to make genuinely hard decisions, not make easy decisions and then simply spin them as hard as has been the case with the Rudd government.