Kim Carr (Victoria, Australian Labor Party, Minister for Innovation, Industry, Science and Research) Share this | Hansard source

I thank Senator Marshall for the question. The square kilometre array is precisely the sort of thing that we should be thinking about in Science Meets Parliament week. The SKA is a $2 billion radio telescope that will have 50 times the sensitivity and 10,000 times the survey speed of present radio telescopes. It will generate huge spin-offs in supercomputing, fibre optics, non-grid and renewable energy, construction and manufacturing over its 50-year life. The ICT requirements will be huge. The array will generate 200 gigabytes of data a second. That is the equivalent of all the words ever spoken by human beings in its first month of operation. The computer needed to process this data has not yet been invented. The SKA will make it happen. It will drive innovation across Australia and build a capacity that will benefit the entire research community as well as industry. This is a massive infrastructure project—