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Transcript
NATIONAL PRESS CLUB ADDRESS
Wednesday 24 March 2004
Thank you very much Ken and thank you for the invitation from the National Press Club to address the audience here today and those that are viewing it through the ABC. Especially welcome to the students from Clonard Catholic College. I’d also recognise Keith Macgregor and his deputy vice president of Thompson ISI, Professor Chris Fell, who amongst many other things chaired one of the three key reviews of research in Australia which I am releasing today, but I also recognise my colleagues Senator John Tierney who chairs the Government’s policy committee on Education, Science and Training, Senator Kim Carr the Shadow Minister for Science and giving Brendan Nelson a hard time, and he’s ably joined in that of course by Senator Natasha Stott Despoja, the Democrats spokesperson for Education, and importantly, to all of you, members of the scientific and educational community including of course the university sector, and ladies and gentleman.
I firstly acknowledge the Ngunnawal, traditional Aboriginal people upon whose involuntary sacrifices this building and Canberra has been built, through the large work and sacrifices also of many in this room here and those who came before us. I also send, its self-indulgent Ken, I send a cheerio to my Mother. The 24th March is a very important day in her life and that of our family’s.
Congratulations to the 17 laureates who’ve been recognise by Thompson ISI today for outstanding citation rates in science. Whilst the majority of Australians wouldn’t necessarily understand what that means, it’s into your hands that we place our future and that of our children, and thank you for your hard work and your endeavours in the field of science, often I think, in spite of the way you see it in spite of governments and government policy. I’d also recognise and thank the Chief Scientist Dr Robin Batterham who’s here today, for his extraordinary hard work and leadership, but for particularly working with me over the last two years on a range of issues including Higher Education Reform, Backing Australia’s Ability and Australian Science and Innovation Programme.
In a previous life that Ken alluded to, my wife says when I had one, when I was practising medicine people ceased to be human beings and they became patients, and in the world that I have had the privilege to be in actually for now just over eight years as the Federal Member for the electorate of Bradfield, human beings become constituents. A constituent sent me a book just before Christmas in 1997 entitled “Revelation” which is a fairly heavy theological read about change and it’s by a German physicist and philosopher called Bernhard Philberth and he said “progress leads to chaos if not anchored in tradition. Tradition becomes rigid if it does not prepare the way for progress, but a perverted traditionalism and the misguided progressivism propel each other towards a deadly excess hardly leaving any ground between them”. And I think in a similar vein Kenneth Clarke the British Historian, having reviewed civilisations throughout history, made the observation that no matter how complex and sophisticated it may be, that society is fragile. He said we can destroy ourselves with cynicism and disillusionment just as effectively as we (inaudible).
Here we are today, Australias, at least the crème de la crème of Australia’s scientific community that were able to be here, and those who are watching, in a country of 20 million people who are 0.3% of world population, who are 1% of global GDP, we are 3.7% of the GDP of the United States of America and we’re still only 6% of APEC. And yet as you were able to discuss this morning we produce 2.9% of the world’s scientific publications, and in fact as Nancy Bayers analysis has advised us - our citation rate is 4.2%. And then of course if you look at publications (inaudible) in space science approaching 10%, in geoscience is 7%, in clinical medicine some 5%, we would be as the Prime Minister would say if he was here “punching well and truly above our weight”. We will invest in terms of public investment $5.4 billion of hard earned tax-payers money in research and development in terms of public investment this year. At least in 2000 that was 0.71% of gross domestic product which compares with the OECD average of 0.68%. We also are living in a country which is changing very quickly.
It is interesting; I spoke to a breakfast audience in Bundaberg about a month ago, and then in questions a man stood up, who was probably in his early fifties, but looked a little bit older by virtue of the sort of work that I think he had done throughout his life, and introduced himself as a fisherman and his father had been a fisherman, and he said every day there are changes in this community that are stopping me from doing what I have to do to earn a living. He said I don’t always understand it, he said, but I am trying to. He said I don’t think my kids are going to earn a living fishing, he said but I think the government ought to invest more money in some sort of social research to help us understand what is happening in our community and help us to adapt to the changes that we are seeing around us every single day.
When I finished school in 1975 as you’d be well aware, manufacturing was 21% of this nation’s entire gross domestic product, it is now less than 12. In the same year agriculture was 5.4% of GDP, it is now 3.2%. And whilst those represent, I think, to us obviously economic indicies with which we would be only too familiar, to several million Australians it represents displacement from not only jobs and relatively low-skilled jobs in many cases, but also major transformation in entire communities in regional and rural Australia. And in terms of facing the future the solutions lie very much in your hands. It is obvious for us, or it should be, as a relatively small country, that our future, the sort of country that my children are going to be living in when they are 45 or half dead as my teenage daughter described me when I had that event, my mother was not impressed when I passed that on, my grandfather even less so, that it is obvious that the economic and social legacy that we will leave them will be determined entirely by our ability to learn how to learn to develop ideas in this country and from them technologies which we apply not just to traditional, but new and emerging industries. And in fact, when you look at the transformation in mining and agriculture for example, and other land and labour intensive industries, it’s robotics, it’s ICT, it’s biotechnology, it’s imaging transfer processes; all new and emerging processes that are adding such sustainability to industries that gave my, I think often selfish generation, an economic legacy that I think also too often we have taken for granted, but you in this room most certainly have not.
We also know that from work that has been done by CSIRO, they’ve added about $90million a year to Australia’s grain yield and recent research that we did of grain producers found that more than half said that their farming practices had changed as a direct result of research and development. The way ahead for us, and I would argue whatever our politics or circumstances or wherever we live, is defined by a number of things that we need to do. And as the fisherman in Bundaberg I think, rather eloquently reminds us, if all of the applied scientific problems of life were ever solved, all of the important questions would remain unanswered. The $2.8billion that we will invest this year in university research, which by the way is 10% above the OECD average, 19 % above that of Canada and 30% above that of the UK, half a billion dollars of that will be in humanities, arts and social sciences because knowledge itself is hard enough, but how we as human beings understand that knowledge, how we adapt to it, how we apply it, and how we live in vast long-term ignorance of the consequences of new knowledge, that is a far more difficult challenge for us. And as a government what we have done is we have set out a number of things. The first is, and Robin Batterham has done an outstanding job in this regard in leading the Prime Minister’s science, engineering and innovation council, and several times a year we spend all day with the Prime Minister and the evening before with the nation’s best scientists and representatives from our university sector giving the Prime Minister, myself, my colleagues and my senior officials advice on what we should be doing in science. We have set, through a detailed process of community and scientific consultation, four broad research priorities for Australia. We are, as I suppose you know, a relatively small country. There is a limit no matter how much economic growth we can deliver, a limit to how much Australia will be able to invest in science. So we’ve set four broad priorities: That Australia be an environmentally sustainable continent; That we promote and maintain good health, in the end the health and integrity of human life is everything; Thirdly, that we apply our research to frontier technologies for transforming and maintaining and growing Australian industries; and fourthly safeguarding Australia. And I make no apology for it but we have enmeshed in that humanities, arts and social sciences. An environmentally sustainable country isn’t just about mathematics and applied science and fuel engineering technologies and geosciences, it is about how do we change farming practices, how do we change behaviour of all of us in domestic and suburban kitchens, and at the moment you can see we are even going through adapting to dealing without plastic bags when we go to the supermarket. Similarly, in terms of safeguarding Australia, we have added another priority goal. It isn’t just about terrorism and bio terrorism and securing us from weeds and pests. It is a question of how do we, how do my children learn to live and thrive and adapt to a world that is quite different from the one that existed before the heinous events of September 11 in New York. We need to be alert but how do we make sure that our children are not alarmed and that is the key responsibility of us in social science.
The third thing that we did, I was prompted over the weekend to get myself another viewing of Monty Python’s Life Of Brian having dealt in the last couple of weeks with the sex discrimination act and trying to get more men into primary school teaching and there is a scene there of course where the character of John Cleese is asking his acolyte “What have the Romans ever done for us?” And of course he’s inviting the crowd to say “nothing” and then of course they say "oh well there was the roads, and we had aqueducts and we had health and we had law and order and we had education" and Cleese then says "well of course, apart from all of those things what have the Romans done for us?" “Well absolutely nothing”. There has been the odd occasion in the last couple of years when I’ve said to my staff, I’ve said “I feel as if I am John Cleese in the Life Of Brian” because it’s not unusual for very good and effective advocates of the scientific community to say “What has the government done for science?” and amongst the many things and those figures on proportion of GDP in relation to research and development precede the $3 billion, 5 year programme of Backing Australia’s Ability. Of the $736 million extra money for the Australian Research Council effectively doubling its budget. Or the $586 million for systemic research infrastructure, libraries, laboratories and key broadband infrastructure in university sectors, or the $227 million for Cooperative Research Centres, or the 2000 extra places for universities in science and technology, pipelining to five and a half thousand, the three Centres of Excellence that have cost more than $150 million, the major national research facilities, the R&D start programmes for commercialisation programmes for emerging technology, and all of those things which are, with which we have another two years to run before the end of the current five year cycle.
The next thing that we have sought to do in preparing our country, or more importantly, I think, giving the next generation the capacity to create the future they want, rather than necessarily the one that they think they’re going to get – is reform of Australian higher education. And I pay special tribute to the then President of the Australian Vice Chancellor’s Committee, Professor Derrick Schroeder. I haven’t seen him wearing one of those little AO things, but he’s a bloke who deserves one, for anyone who’s interested. And the leadership of the Australian Vice Chancellor’s Committee, for the leadership that it showed in making sure that we address the inevitable deadline that is bearing down on us, and that is that increasingly, the standard of higher education in Australia is not being prepared between Melbourne and Sydney, rivalries that have existed for more than a century and a half - the only benchmarks that will count increasingly are international ones. Where do we compare with the rest of the world? And for that, in particular, Professor Ian Chubb and the Australian National University should be extremely proud of their achievements in research, apart from anything else. And in order to deal with that it means two things, two things that we have sought to deliver, firstly access by universities to a lot more money and a lot more of it in the long term. And as you’re well aware, $2.6 billion of extra taxpayers money in the first five years alone, and in addition to that, changing the way in which we regulate and administer the universities. As outstanding an institution as it is, Charles Sturt University faces quite a different mission from that of the University of New South Wales, and so too right across the country.
The fourth thing that we have done is sought to look at Australia’s research agenda, which is what I know that many of you are here for. We have undertaken five enquiries, into which we have invested a significant sum of taxpayers resources to better inform the development of policy. We have had a major national exercise in Mapping Australia’s Science and Innovation Programme, led by the Chief Scientist, and I thank and congratulate all the States and Territories and scientific community for their respective co-operation in that regard. For the first time now we have a much better idea of who is doing what, where is it being done, what commercialisation outcomes are we getting and what are we missing - a fundamental platform for formulating policy if we want to drive reform in research. We then had Professor Chris Fell, who has undertaken a review of Australia’s knowledge and innovation programme. For those of you, particularly at home who think what on earth is that, that is essentially the way in which we distribute the research resources which go into Australian universities. The report of Chris’s work is being released today, and you will see that there are eighteen recommendations in the Knowledge and Innovation Report. It recommends that we do not substantially move away from the balance between block funding of research and competitive funding of research. It does, however, recommend that we move away from the caps that are in a number of our research programmes, it also recommends that we review, at the very least, the separations component of the $540 million Research Training Scheme. It also recommends that we need a performance framework in terms of assessing what is quality research in Australia. And at the risk of offending some of you – I’m a lay person coming into this, yes I happen to have a medical degree, that does not of itself mean, as Professor Chubb will confirm, that I know a lot about science, apart from what he taught me. But sometimes when I go to a university I’ll find a very small number of researchers working in a field in under resourced facilities, and then I will go to another university working in the same field where there’ll be an enormous amount of infrastructure and personnel, and one wonders how long, as a country, that we can sustain funding all kinds of research in all institutions who choose to do that. That we need to move towards differentiation and specialisation. And as Chris has asked us in the Report, asked the question essentially in his Report, how do we measure quality? How can I, as the Minister, or whoever succeeds me, how can we make meaningful and objective decisions about what is quality research into which, as I say, we invest in total some $5.4 billion. We need to start to move toward developing a framework so that when the Vice Chancellors of the Group of Eight, who put certain views to me about the quality of research conducted in their institutions, that what they are saying can be substantiated by examination against an external framework.
Professor Don – sorry it should be Professor, but Don McGauchie chaired a Review into collaboration between our major research agencies. Not long after I came into the job I thought, well if you turned up from Mars and looked at the way we distribute research resources in Australia, would we do it the way we do. Is there enough collaboration between CSIRO, the Institute of Marine Science, Defence Science Technology Organisation and our major publicly funded research agencies and our universities? The same number of taxpayers are funding research in all of them. And Don McGauchie has found, for example, that there is an enormous amount of collaboration already. For example, in 1980, 30% of papers that were produced were by single authors, it’s now less than 10%. And similarly good examples of research, for example, are the Queensland Bio Sciences Centre, CSIRO, the universities and industry. Or the Institute of Marine Science and James Cook University, which we funded through an announcement which I made on behalf of the Government last year. But what he has also recommended is that co-location of research facilities should be the default option, and also that there should be a pool of money which can be accessed collaboratively by publicly funded research agencies and universities and other private research institutes. His Committee has also recommended that we need to look at, consider at least, having funding for university infrastructure and publicly funded research agency infrastructure, which can be competitively accessed for collaborative programmes. He has also recommended that we establish a Commonwealth Strategic Research Council, to centralise decisions about the general direction in which we want to take research, including decisions about research infrastructure. And Mike Sargent, who led the Review into Australia’s Research Infrastructure decision making, reached a similar conclusion. That at the moment we’ve been through the facile debacle of the synchotron, where the Government, as a part of its major national research facilities announces that, under Backing Australia’s Ability, that we would support a synchotron, and then we have this ridiculous situation where we have two states bidding against one another to get it, and where, in fact as a relatively small country, we need to be capable of making rational decisions about the best infrastructure in which we should invest, where it should be sited, how do we get early access to international platforms of major research infrastructure, which we may not be able to afford, or indeed we duplicate, if at the same time can access internationally other major research infrastructure.
The final area which we’re focussing upon is the commercialisation of research. In Australia, at the moment, I think only 2.8% of business or industries, research and development dollar is invested in universities, and that’s something that we earnestly must address. In fact only, just under 5% of Australian research revenues actually come from investment from the private sector. If you look at the top 20 universities in the United States, in terms of licence revenues, some 9.2% of their research expenditures comes from licensed revenues, whereas in Australia we only have three universities that achieved more than 5% of research expenditures from licensed revenues. University of New England, which might surprise some people, but that’s certainly the case; Flinders University and the University or Melbourne. For example, some 4.5% of University of New England’s operating budget is derived from its’ research licence, revenues. Similarly right across the university sector, even if you take into account what cashed up equity, royalties, trade marks and licences are contributing, at most, on average 3% of revenues right across the sector. So one of the recommendations again, of the Don McGauchie Review, is that we need to revisit expert advice in terms of the commercialisation of intellectual property, which is produced in both our publicly funded research agencies and in our universities. And in the development, and there will be another Backing Australia’s Ability, one of the things I’ve learnt since I’ve been in politics, people who have been around a lot longer than me Ken, have said “Well you ought to think carefully about going into limited term programmes, no matter how good they are, because when it comes to an end, then you’re accused of not being committed to whatever it is that you’ve done for a limited period of time.” So, there will be another Backing Australia’s Ability programme, it will be informed by the Reports, which have been conducted, the Mapping exercise, the three Reviews which we’re releasing today, and also the Review of Quality Teaching, conducted by Professor Kwong Lee Dow.
And in concluding I’d also like to say, as Australia’s Minister for Education and Training, as well as the Minister for Science, and the enormous privilege that attaches to that, that in the end many of us in Australia are interested in what Guy Sebastian is doing, we want to make sure that Delta Goodram’s getting over her illness and hopefully wins even more awards than she has and produces good music. Some of us at least, a lot of us, are interested in whether Mark Skaife will win at Mount Panorama in October. There are a whole range of those things. We don’t always focus on what you in the scientific community do. But I’d like to thank you on behalf of all Australians for everything that you do to develop our, not just our economic wealth, but also our social and our human capital. It’s not something that any of us take for granted, I can assure you. And that will be reflected in the commitment that the Government will continue to make in the fields of research. And as I have said on previous occasions too, that our wars against terrorism will never be won if all we do is fight them with military hardware, and military personnel and high tech equipment, which we obviously must do, and we are doing. It is ultimately the struggle against what Socrates described as the root of all evil, and that is ignorance. It is our own ignorance at times, and the ignorance of others in other parts of the world. And that is why education is so critically important. It’s about resilience for life. The more that we can invest in education, which is of a high quality, which we can measure as being of a high quality, the more that we can find and develop human potential in all its fields, then the stronger the country that we will be, and the more likely we will be to overcome attitudes and ideas which are founded in ignorance, prejudice and fear. Fear of change in people and cultures we don’t always understand or perhaps even like.
Thanks.
MC:
Thank you very much Minister. Our period of questions today starts with one, Emma McDonald.
Journalist:
Today is a very proud day for Australian scientists, but there is some mention of the appropriateness of block grants in major publicly funded research agencies in the Reports. I wondered how you would allay the fears that will inevitably arise within the scientific community over that. And the second part of the question is, while commercialisation of research is often lucrative, what about public interest research which may struggle to find a commercial collaboration?
Brendan Nelson:
Yes, thanks Emma. Firstly we turn money into knowledge. We should never be frightened of turning knowledge back into money. And clearly research has a number of objectives, one of them obviously is the development of technologies, which improve ultimately our economic productivity and hopefully also our standard of living. But the other is research informs our understanding of ourselves. We are working very hard to sustain very high rates of economic growth in our country. As you know we are growing twice the OECD average and faster than the GCF. But ultimately it’s our values and our beliefs. The way that we relate to one another and we see our place in the world. That will define who we are as a people. And that is where research particularly, in social sciences, humanities and arts is very, very important. And one of the many measures in the Higher Education reforms, about which you wouldn’t have read, because a lot of this stuff doesn’t get reported, is we have moved to establish and fund a Council for Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences. It is, as John Niland said to me when I first got into the job, that research in universities passes the soul from one generation to the next. The other question about public interest – one of the things that’s very important to protect is public interest. If you go to any university, I mean if you go and see Bob Clarke and his quantum computer at University of New South Wales, you can see that the potential for commercialisation is significant. It is much less so in the humanities or history department. And I think one of the funding models that we, as a country need to look at, is the extent to which we can divert some of the revenues which come into commercialised research into those areas which serve public interest.
Journalist:
You talked at the end of your speech generally about the role of education helping us overcome the ignorance that threatens the world at the moment, but earlier on you talked about how one, the research priorities has got to be helping children back to the modern world, and how do we make sure that our children are not alarmed. Could you explain what you meant by that and what sort of practical things you are talking about?
Brendan Nelson:
Sure. Well Tory, as I say, I am 45 and my kids have made an observation about that, but if you were suddenly parachuted from the age when I was 15 into today and computers and new technologies and all of the things which are changing every day, to which we adapt, you would have an enormous amount of trouble adapting. And it is clear that the world in which all of us live is quite different today from what it was prior to the events of September 11. One of the challenges, in fact one of the key challenges I think for us, is how do we live in a world of fundamentalist intolerance? How do we learn with and adapt to living in ignorance of the long term consequences of decisions that we make? How do we learn to adapt to unprecedented economic - global economic uncertainty? Or how do we learn to live with a rate of technological change which many of us, I know, struggle to keep up with? And if we don’t, and we don’t support and fund research which develops our understanding of how we adapt to change, then we should not be surprised if we produce people who become lightening rods for grief and anger about things we don’t like. I would argue, for example, that Mrs Hanson has played in part a role in that, in the latter part of the last century. That’s what’s really important. I think Peter Drucker said that when people look back on this period of time in history they will see that our most difficult challenge was change, and all of a sudden how we had to all adapt to it.
Journalist:
Dr Nelson, the Research Training Scheme, which I suppose is the apprenticeship scheme for the academics of the future, has famously been described as rorted and rortable. What’s wrong with the RTS, how does it need to change and given your concerns about the social sciences and the importance of the humanities, what do you say about the findings in this Report, that the operation of the knowledge and innovation changes has adversely affected some of these areas, and the mechanisms for measuring quality needs to be improved?
Brendan Nelson:
Right OK. Well the first thing is that the Knowledge and Innovation Programme, the Research Training Scheme, which I think is $540 million a year, Institutional Grants Scheme which is $285 million and Research Infrastructure Block Grant is $160 million a year. The first two are primarily funded based on three parameters. The Research Training Scheme is 50% research income attracted, 40% separations, (like how many students do you get through to completion) and 10% publications, and the Institutional Grants Scheme is of course 60% income revenue from research, 30% I think student load and 10% publications. The first thing is that at least now we have some objectivity in terms of the money we provide to support, as you say Samantha, the apprenticeships in research. There have been arguments put to me from some universities, that they are extremely angry about the complexity of the formula, which is reflected in Professor Fells Report, secondly that there is an argument that has been put forward that students don’t complete their research training for a variety of reasons, for which the university itself, should not be published and that that particular part of the formula needs to be reviewed. In fact some people think that it ought to be abolished. I have a very high regard for Professor Fell and those who worked on the Committee and as in all things, you apply a commonsense test to it and you say that when the Vice Chancellor of Melbourne University says to me “Look, we are actually being punished because we have attracted – we’re actually saving taxpayers money”, your ears do prick up. Over the next two months we will be, when I say we – in consultation with the scientific community, my Department and I, we will be seriously reviewing, examining the recommendations, as we already have been of Professor Fells Report, and we will be making some changes to the RTS.
The other thing that I should have said, by the way, in response to Emma – in terms of block grants. Vicki Sara, from the ARC, and her colleagues, naturally argued that we should have much more of our research resources being competitive, performance based research and a lower proportion in block grant money – I think it’s fair to say that I’m convinced by both Don McGauchie and Chris Fell, that we need to maintain, at the very least, maintain our block grant funding for universities. It’s very important in terms of long term strategic research and also supporting new and emerging researchers.
Yes, of course we want to talk about quality measurements. One of the things is we make decisions, those of us who are privileged to be elected to Parliament and then into Government and Cabinet, we make decisions about whether we will spend money in CSIRO, or whether the Institute of Marine Science, or ANSTO, or universities in terms of research. But on what basis do we currently make it? How do we objectively measure the quality of research that is delivered? Now, Nancy’s done all this work with citation rates, publication rates, of course by any standard that is critically important. But one of the things that has been recommended to us, to which I must say I’m positively disposed, is developing some kind of external framework against which we can make more objective measures about the quality of research, applied research and research in humanities and arts and social sciences. Because, no matter how good we are at the moment, I just have a feeling that not all the best quality research always gets funded.
Journalist:
Dr Nelson, can you give us a guarantee that the three Reports you listed there haven’t been edited to reflect Government priority and secondly you talk about commercialisation and we are hearing a number of stories out of CSIRO that contracts have been asked to be signed again, where staff have been asked to give away their moral rights to that research, i.e. that they can’t share. Do you have concerns that this may become increasingly so with the push for more commercialisation?
Brendan Nelson:
Thanks. Firstly, ask Professor Fell and Mr McGauchie and Mike Sargent in terms of the editing, you’ll need to ask them. So I think they’d probably, well I won’t on national television, I better be careful what I say, but I don’t think they’d be impressed if there had been anything like that. But on the more substantive issue, this is a really important issue. I think one of the problems we’ve got is that if you are doing research, whether it’s in an Australian university or whether its in CSIRO or anywhere else, we should have a culture where the researchers themselves, and this is already emerging in our university sector in particular, the researchers themselves should have equity in the intellectual property which they have produced. Now that is a generalisation, which can’t be applied to every specific circumstance, and I don’t know the specifics to which you’re referring, but as a general rule, there ought to be a sharing of the benefits from the commercialising of that intellectual property shared by the researcher, the department within which he or she works and the institution by which they are employed. That is really important. I mean it’s commonsense. Look, I met a fellow when I was a backbencher, I met a fellow in a research agency I won’t name, but he developed a world class technology that had earned millions of dollars for his organisation, and he hadn’t got a single extra dollar out of that, except his salary. And he wasn’t actually after it, which says a lot about the scientific community, but I thought to myself, that man ought to have access to a lot of money from the equity which was produced.
Journalist:
Dr Nelson, you confirm for us today that there will be another Backing Australia’s Ability. Can you give us any indication what form that will take? And also you’ve said that you were convinced that block grants should continue for universities. How do you feel about any changes to that system for the publicly funded research agencies?
Brendan Nelson:
Well I appreciate you’ve got to ask me the question, but I think I wouldn’t get a warm – it would be very warm if I got back to Parliament and had announced whatever might be subsequently announced in the Budget. Look suffice it to say that Backing Australia’s Ability Part Two will very much be informed by experiences with BAA 1, the Reviews which have been conducted by the lead reviewers and the Chairman, and it will comprise, as you would expect, the balance of research and commercialisation and support for private sector participation, including collaboration.
Journalist:
You talked about, and have done so for some time, about the need for greater collaboration in research, and you mentioned the example, I think, as perhaps one of the more ridiculous sort of arguments we’ve seen in recent years, but I mean how can you possibly hope to overcome what’s been a massive problem for all sorts of Australian industry and that is just the great distances between our population centres. How can you hope to overcome the competitiveness between States that might want to be each at the cutting edge of research and innovation?
Brendan Nelson:
Money. That something seems very hard, there’s no reason for anyone in Government to take a defeatist attitude to it. As a Government we are determined to do what is in the best interests of Australia and to put issues on the agenda which are critically important to driving the economic and social development of this country, and one of those things is a more rational, collaborative approach to research and one which is essentially making key decisions on the basis of quality. We’ve had a lot of co-operation from the States, for which they ought to be given great credit, through these Reviews, and the Mapping exercise, and that, in itself, suggests that I think, and I suspect Mr Bracks, who’s got a big black hole in trying to fund that synchotron, possibly in his quiet moments has a little bit of regret about the haste with which he made that decision and announcement. It is so important. We’ve just invested $60 million of your money, it’s your money, your taxpayer’s money, in broadbanding and connection of our universities, and driving the Pacific connection through the US, those are things that need to be funded when you continue to fund, but we’ve got to start to make some, and philosophically not by nature centralist, but we need to start to make some decisions as Australians, rather than proud Victorians or Queenslanders.
Journalist:
I hesitate to ask this fairly basic political question in front of this learned crowd, but you have a very impressive grasp of figures. If I can just talk to you about some figures that have come out recently. The polls, which suggest the Government, the Government and yourself are headed for political oblivion. You are a realist when it comes to politics, what does a Government have to do to take Labor to win the next Election? Are you, there appears to be a sense of panic, certainly amongst those holding marginal seats, do you share that? And is education, spending on education and research going to be the way for the Government to get back on the front foot?
Brendan Nelson:
He’s the senior political writer for those who don’t know. Which would be obvious. What the Government has to do and what the Government is doing, Steve, is governing for Australia. We have to make the right decisions, using all the information that we’ve got, and exercising judgement which is in Australia’s best interests. And in the end we’ve got to decide – how the country, it’s often the things that are most important to us in our lives that we attempt to take for granted, that’s human nature. But we’re living in a country with record low interest rates, record low level of unemployment. A school principal said to me recently, having spent a bit of time criticising me on a couple of things, Steve, he then said, “Oh by the way, good luck this year, I hope you guys get elected.” He said “The shop’s running really well, the Government’s doing a terrific job.” He said “12 years ago, when we had kids at school, parents would be in tears at the school because they knew their kids had no hope.” And he said “Now they go straight out of school into a job, university, TAFE, apprenticeship.” These are things that don’t happen by magic, they don’t happen other than through hard work and making decisions and making sure that we do the things that are important in terms of macro economic management, keeping interest rates low, creating the environment with a flexible productive labour market – keeps unemployment low. They are the things that we are going to do. And as many of you know, I know there’s some people here that knew me from my previous life, I have spent much of my public life working with young people on the edge, who are in strife. It’s easy to come here and stand right here where I am, as Mark Latham was five weeks ago, and describe what he said was a crisis in masculinity. That’s one thing, and many of us, particularly as parents, and the 1 in 7 kids in fatherless families, we know exactly what that’s about. But then it requires the courage of your convictions to do things that are necessary to deliver. And it means making difficult decisions. And what is right for Australia isn’t always popular, but we will do what is right. And so in terms of the polls, Australians will make their judgement.
MC:
Dr Nelson, you’ve become rather well known in recent times for answering difficult questions from young people, here’s another one. A last question.
Brendan Nelson:
Don’t ask me to spell.
MC:
That’s become a deadly trap. The last question today is from Caitlin Marney, a student on your left.
Caitlin Marney:
Minister. I would like to ask you a question regarding your broader education policies. Is there a more uniform and comprehensive reporting system for schools to parents? Do you see any way for students to be involved in this process, particularly at secondary age levels? Additionally in the future, could this reporting system be utilised by employers, and how do you feel about this?
Brendan Nelson:
Well Cate, if you’d like to be my personal adviser on this, you most certainly will be. One of the things that we, the Prime Minister and I recently announced the funding for schools for the next four years from the Australian Government. But we also released a consultation paper. And we’re asking teachers, parents and you – students, because it’s all about you and your interests – about what you want and what you think and what you think is important in a school education.
If you excuse me, I’ll just show you something.
One of the problems at the moment is that as parents, I know you’re a bit way off this, we have no way of deciding what is a good school. We have to make decisions based on the uniform – your’s looks terrific – the way the garden is attended, the state of the buildings, the tidiness of the students and behaviour in the streets. We have no real information. What we’re saying is there’s a number of things. We need to drive a nationally consistent education system. We currently have eight different starting ages, 330 different exams that young people sit to get into university. I can’t tell you that the physics exam you’ll do in Victoria is of the same standard as Queensland. We also need, not the mediocrity of a national curriculum, but we need common tests, so you can be confident the tests that you’re doing are just pretty much the same tests that an Aboriginal student will be doing in Kununurra. We also need to make sure that reading and writing and numeracy skills are tested and measured and reported to parents in the formative years, in years 3, 5 and 7. The biggest barrier to young people getting into university is not money – it is inadequate Year 12 results. And the single biggest determinant of the Year 12 outcome is Year 9 literacy. So we want parents to get information. Now what we’re going to do, is we’re going to ask the States, and again I come back to Malcolm’s question, he says “How do you do it?” And I say “money”. We’re going to say that the conditions for funding for States and Territories, the things they must do – literacy and numeracy tests results have got to be reported to parents against national benchmarks. Pretty basic stuff you’d think. But in five of the eight jurisdictions at the moment, for example the only people in the state of Queensland that don’t know that 1 in 5 boys can’t pass a basic Year 5 reading test are their parents. Publicly available information on school performance; academic employment and training outcomes. If you’re in Australia and you’re trying to choose where to live and looking at a school to go to, try and get information about Year 12 results. How many kids got apprenticeships, how many kids went to TAFE, how many kids got jobs, how many kids went to university? Teacher professional development – the single most important thing in the schools is the quality of the teacher, apart from us Cate, and our parents, it is teachers who most make us the people that we are. And yet at the moment we have no way of knowing the qualifications of the teachers, and most importantly, are they involved in programmes of keeping up to date in modern teaching practice. And that information should be available to us. Greater national consistency in schooling, timely plain language reports – now I’ve seen school reports, Primary School’s the biggest problem, where the Report says A- tick a box; A-Achieving or AA-Almost Achieving. So Ken, you know, you’re running here from Canberra, to Sydney, and you know, Malcolm Farr rings me and says “Oh how’s Ken going?” And I say “he’s almost achieving”. So Malcolm says “what is he doing up his shoe laces, or is, you know, has he got to Campbelltown?” But at the moment, often in schools, as a parent, if my son or daughter is in the bottom 5% or 10% of the class - and somebody has to be there - but you are more likely to be there because there’s a problem – I want to know about it. But at the moment in many cases, I can’t find out.
Similarly a National State Schools Framework, an anti-bullying programme which is well designed, effective and well resourced in every school, and meet performance targets in numeracy, literacy, science, ICT, vet and civics. Now you would think that these things would be unremarkable, but it is time that we prepared your generation to be Australian and global citizens and not only proud Victorians, well educated in the Victorian Education system. So you, today, have been appointed my chief adviser for Young People, and I’m not joking about this, of Young People on what we would put into the legislation in terms of parents getting results.
Thank you very much.
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