Adam Bandt (Melbourne, Australian Greens) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Yesterday I had the privilege of attending here in Parliament House a gathering of some of this country's leading scientists and researchers. The budget cuts to parliamentary screening procedures must have kicked in, because I am sure there is no way the Abbott government would have let so many qualified scientists and researchers into the building knowingly. They were here to launch this very important book Science Matters: How we will address the challenges of Australia's future.

The leading scientists and researchers of our country made very clear and compelling case that it is central to Australia's future economic prosperity that we continue to invest in science and research. That is something that I, as the member for Melbourne and the Greens spokesperson on science and research, am acutely aware of. Since 2009 Australia makes more every year from exporting health and medical related products than we do from exporting cars, but you would not know it. Every time the car industry gets in trouble it is front-page news, yet successive governments think nothing of taking the axe to the health and medical research budget every time they want to balance the books. But it is more than about simply economic benefits to the country.

We cannot only fund the research that seems to be economically applied; we need to defend what one scientist yesterday called curiosity-driven research. Unless we back things that, on the face of it, may seem to have no application or no direct economic benefit we will not get those kinds of breakthroughs that have led to technology and science that we now apply in everyday life. So we need a plan in this country to do what President Obama has done and say, 'We are going to spend three per cent of our GDP on science, research and development.' Other countries, including our trading partners, are already exceeding that, yet here in Australia we are at 2.2 per cent. Thanks to this government, we are going backwards.

The last government, as I said, threatened $300 million in cuts to the National Health and Medical Research Council budget. Researchers and scientists, in their lab coats, took to the streets around the country in their thousands and defeated those cuts. Here, this government has got rid of the science minister, and we are now one of only two or three countries in the OECD without a science and research plan. It is for that reason that I have been proud, this year, to launch the Respect Research campaign. As a country, we need to make a clear decision that we will back research and science so that this country has an industry when the rest of the world tells us to stop digging and so that all those people who are engaged in curiosity-driven research and all those people who are working out the next cure for cancer know that they have certainty beyond the vicissitudes of the three-year political cycle and that they will not be subject to the budget axe every time government needs to try and balance the books. I urge people to get involved with respectresearch.com.au.