Kim Carr (Victoria, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Industry) Share this | Hansard source

I think you just ran away, didn’t you? What we have heard today is a great deal of talk from this government about its so-called reform agenda. But what we have also seen is that the Productivity Commission, a group of people that is well known for its modest, moderate and extremely cautious language when it comes to defending the government’s policies, has brought forward a report on Australia’s science and innovation system, Public support for science and innovation. I notice that the minister, in a sort of John Mortimer’s ‘Soapy’ Ballard presentation that we had today, tried to explain that this was really a good report for the government. If you actually read this document, you will find that the Productivity Commission has highlighted the fact that our $6 billion public funding for science and research is in need of a major overhaul. Reading directly from the summary of the key points on page 16 of the report, the Productivity Commission draws our attention to the need for ‘major improvements’:

Major improvements are needed in some key institutional and program areas.

It goes on to point out that there are ‘notable shortcomings in business programs’. I repeat: this is from the Productivity Commission, one of the great bastions of support for this government’s economic policies. It is now saying to us that there are ‘notable shortcomings’ in the government’s business research and development program.

The Productivity Commission goes on to point out that the R&D tax concession needs a major overhaul. It also points out that the CRC program needs to be restored to its original policy objectives—policy objectives, I might note, laid down by Labor—and return to the proposition of public-good research. It goes on to say that, with these new changes that the government has introduced, there are major ‘problems in the governance and intellectual property frameworks of universities, weaknesses in their commercial arms and shortcomings in proof-of-concept funding’. And this is the most damning of all the criticisms it makes of public sector research and development:

However, the pursuit of commercialisation for financial gain by universities, while important in its own right, should not be to the detriment of maximising the broader returns from the productive use of university research.

The Productivity Commission is drawing our attention to the failure of the government’s cargo cult mentality when it comes to the commercialisation of research. The report continues:

The structure of funding for higher education research has increasingly eroded the share of block grants. Further erosion would risk undermining their important role in enabling meaningful strategic choices at the institutional level.

So the basic role of universities of educating people and providing people trained in research—scientists, technicians and the various other personnel who underpin our whole innovation system—is being put at risk, not to mention the fundamental role of our universities and public research agencies to address the problems faced by society and find solutions to those problems.

Finally, the Productivity Commission draws our attention to this:

The costs of implementing the Research Quality Framework may well exceed the benefits.

This is the rolled gold, newly minted research program that the government are spending $87 million to put in place. Yet their very own Productivity Commission is now telling us that the cost of implementing the Research Quality Framework may well exceed the benefits.

When it comes to research policy, it is quite clear the government has failed. It has adopted a cargo cult mentality to commercialisation. It has presumed that the rest of the world is not spending, the rest of the world is not moving forward, and that it can just set and forget our research programs and hope other countries to do the same. That is not happening. We are falling behind the rest of the world. We have a situation where China is now doubling its R&D every couple of years, the Europeans and Canadians are setting targets of three per cent of GDP by 2010, and we are on 1.8 per cent. (Time expired)

Question agreed to.