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Transcript of Speech
EDITED TRANSCRIPT SPEECH, ADDRESS TO THE AUSTRALIAN ACADEMY OF
SCIENCE (National Museum of Australia, Canberra) - 2 May, 2002
BRENDAN NELSON:
Thank you very much, Brian, for that very generous introduction.
Brian and Dianne, Jim and Margie Peacock, I also have the
privilege tonight to be in the company of the great Frank Fenner,
the Secretary of my Department, Dr Peter Shergold, past presidents
of the Academy and many distinguished fellows - and those who aspire
to be - and ladies and gentlemen.
Thank you for the privilege of allowing me, firstly, to be here
tonight. I feel like an intellectual pygmy in your presence, I (like
many Australians) live in awe of what you have done for us, and what
you continue to do. So in that sense it's somewhat humbling to be
invited to speak to you at your dinner.
I said in my introductory remarks that in a sense, I come here on
behalf of many Australians, millions of Australians who can't be
here to perhaps say to you in some small way what they would like to
say and that is thank you for doing what you have done for us. We
highly value it, we may not always understand it, but we certainly
understand the importance of it and the difference it has made to
our lives.
When you think of one of the criticisms that we often hear of us
as a nation - which is certainly justified - that we celebrate our
achievements in sport and the arts, which is quite appropriate, but
less often do we give the same kind of stature to those of you who
have made our lives so much better in the fields of science. We've
seven Nobel Prizes. 50 fellows of the Royal Society. You publish 3%
of the world's scientific papers. In geosciences, plant and animal
sciences we publish 5% of the world's papers. Ecology and
environmental science we publish more than 4%. Australian published
research in mathematics is cited 17% more than the world average.
And if you add to this astrophysics, agricultural science and
engineering, and of course medicine: it creates a picture of a
country that in science has done far, far more, arguably, than
perhaps we have even in the field of sport.
I was thinking earlier this afternoon that I think you of the
scientific community, particularly in applied sciences, and
engineering and technology, that you suffer in a way from what we,
in public life, also suffer from, especially in Government, and that
is (for us at least, in Government) that people expect you to get
the economy right. They expect you to make sure that the economic
indices with which we are given the authority to move - that we get
them right. And if you don't get it right you can't expect to be
returned to Government. But if you do get it right, people then tend
to say to us - well ok, now what are you doing about the real
problems?
And I think in a sense, just as an outsider reflecting on the
scientific world, that at times you suffer from that too. You find
solutions to intractable problems particularly in the applied
scientific area, but it's often the things that are done in
philosophy and humanities and fine arts and social sciences that
define who we are as a people, though scientific effort is often
longer remembered in the longer term.
I've said to my colleagues, in relation to the privilege that I
have, to be Australia's Minister for Education and Science and
Training for the first Government elected for the 21st Century, that
we need to understand that the things that will most influence and
guide our future are not the things that we know but the things that
we don't.
We have crossed a critically important threshold from the 20th to
the 21st Century, and whilst it's not expressed in these terms,
there are many Australians who have said to themselves in different
ways: what should we leave in the 20th Century and, therein, what do
we think is important enough to take to the 21st?
I think our real challenge is to take those people who are
traditionalists, the people whose values, whose sacrifices, whose
hard work and idealism made the country what it is, and reassure
them in all kinds of ways. That is the fundamental foundation upon
which we build the 21st Century. At the same time, the
progressivists who seemingly want economic and cultural change for
its own sake, who neither understand, nor at times even care about
the values of traditionalists - we need to restrain them to some
degree, and the responsibility for those who profess to lead,
whether it's the Academy of Science or whether it's in any other
professional organisation or indeed in public life, is to bring each
of these groups to an understanding of why a change is necessary,
and most importantly where we want to go.
By the end of the war the world was marked, as Tony Blair
observed, by 100 segmented markets. You think about Australia today,
you think about the kind of world we're in now: we're coalescing
into 3 major trading blocks, 0.3% of world population, 1% of world
trade and 6% of APEC. And the challenges that we have are that the
people who might be described as traditionalists, who built
Australia in agrarian, land and labour intensive industries,
primarily in the exploitation of natural resources in mining and
minerals and agriculture, we need to make sure that they understand
that this century will be about applying knowledge (and new
knowledge in particular) to those traditional industries, as much as
it is about supporting new and emerging industries in a moving
services sector.
When I had the privilege to go to the Tweed Heads Campus of
Southern Cross University three weeks ago to open a new campus
there, which I'm sure you are aware is a centre of excellence in
information communication technology, interactive video
teleconferencing and a range of other new modalities, there were
about 50 people there. And I sat there on the stage looking at the
crowd, and I was thinking that 100 years before that, we would have
been opening a train line, and there probably would have been 2-2500
people there, and they would've been there because they would
understand the critical importance to the economic and social
development of this country, through the 20th Century, of us
constructing that kind of infrastructure.
But what you are doing, particularly for us now, in the 21st
Century, and what higher education especially must do for us, is
build the equivalent of train lines for the 21st Century. The train
lines, the conventional train lines of course continue to be
important. But my children are much more likely to be working in the
sort of industries that you support and into which you breathe life,
than they are those that perhaps are more accustomed to my parents
generation, and those who came before.
Within three weeks of being in the portfolio there were a number
of things that were clear to me. The first is, that those of you who
argue from the higher education sector that there is a crisis, can I
just say to you, please desist at that kind of language? And the
reason I say that is because there are Australians who are living in
parts of this country where entire industries are disappearing, who
at times have neither the skills nor indeed the level of education
which enables them to deal with that easily.
If you want to see a crisis, have a look at school attendance by
Aboriginal Australians in Arnhem Land: 25-54%. If you want to see a
crisis in education, consider that only 16 of 378 Aboriginal
children outside of Darwin and Alice Springs can pass a basic year 3
reading test. I can take you to kids, in the inner west of Sydney:
when Bill Crews of the Exodus foundation isn't feeding the poor or
looking after prostitutes or drug addicts (with Macquarie University
out the back), he is providing the remedial reading program for
children who spent five years in the Australian Education System,
who say "Oh, it's the black stuff you read".
Crises or problems that bisect any of us in life, individually or
institutionally, are all relative. There are problems in higher
education, but can I say that the calls on the basis of "the
crisis" have not (as I'm sure you can appreciate) fallen on
fertile ground.
But I am convinced that the status quo of Australian universities
will not be sustained. Something will change and something will
give. And there are a number of things happening in life in two
ways. You can either wait until something catastrophic happens and
respond to it. The second (which is my preferred approach) is that
you can envisage where you want to get, where you want to be, and I
suppose it's a sense of vision, it's a campfire around which we
should all be sitting. Whatever our politics, whether we're
Coalition, Labor, Democrat - whatever your politics is not important
in this regard. What's important here is that we need to have a
sense of where we want our universities to be 10 or 20 years from
now.
I found it rather interesting on the ABC recently to be
criticised because I seem to be as concerned about universities a
decade or 20 years from now long after I'm out of it, than I am with
what's going to happen to them this year or next year. Let's not
suggest for one minute that there shouldn't be any sense of
immediate concern or interest of what is going on at the moment, but
we all have a responsibility, given the critical importance of this
sector to the economic and social development of the kind of country
my children will be living in, to be thinking now about what are the
problems and what policy choices do we have before us as
Australians.
The reason why, with the support of the sector and the
department, I have progressed the first of what will be a series of
six discussion papers and put together a Reference Group which will
culminate at the years end with the development of a package of
measures I intend to take to my colleagues for their consideration,
is because there are fundamental questions that have got to be
addressed. Of course, everybody argues that universities need more
money. I hear that. I hear it. But we've got some fundamental
questions. What is a university? What defines a university? It might
sound philosophical in part, but there is a practical application to
that as well. To what extent is scholarship, research and teaching
critically important to defining a university and what extent should
each be a partner? Who goes to university and why are they going
there? Where have we got attrition rates and why do we have them?
(And we've got some research on that.) Why can't we have more
specialisation in the sector? Why do we, the Commonwealth
Government, run the funding system which encourages universities to
be all things to all people, and how can we encourage specialisation
without financial penalty to institutions? Why is it that we've got
20,000 units on offer with less than five enrolees - and 4,200 with
only one?
But they're just some of the things that have got to be
addressed. What is it, culturally in our country, and in terms of
tax law, which militates against private sector investment in
university infrastructure? And if we move further into
commercialisation and intellectual property and science,
engineering, technology and applied sciences, what's the future then
for humanities, fine arts, philosophy, literature and language?
I was asked yesterday by the Australian Financial review whether
I supported elitism, and I said of course I support elitism. I
support the idea of (whether it's individuals or institutions)
pursuing excellence based on idealism, hard work and self-sacrifice.
My children will not ever win a gold medal in swimming, but I can
tell you every time they jump into a swimming pool, they get
reassurance from knowing that there are Australians like them who
reasonably aspire to do so.
We should do everything we can to see that we have a policy, and
a funding paradigm which might reasonably enable one or two
institutions, as distinct from individual parts of them to aspire to
be in the top 50 or 100, however you get it, and the reason for
putting that into the public arena was twofold. The first, was so
that the average, everyday Australian, who's looking for footy
results in the tabloids is able to say with some concern to his or
her mate, "gee I'm a bit worried that Australia can't even get
a university in the top 50", because then that focuses the
people who decide who will govern them on the importance of the
university sector. That's why that's important.
The second reason why it's important is because if we want to
bring, not only people in the sector, but my colleagues and others
in the Federal Parliament, to an understanding of why it's important
we reform policy in this area, we need to understand that we will
never deliver a top 50 institution if we continue with the status
quo. I won't go on further about university reform tonight, but they
are just some of the things that need to be addressed, and the
reason they need to be addressed is because the kind of world, the
kind of standard of living my children will reasonably expect to
enjoy will be determined by what happens in terms of policy in
higher education over the next year or so, and we have a small
window of opportunity to do something.
The last point that I would like to speak on briefly is to
priority setting in science. The real world political issues, the
things that are most concerning Australians in my portfolio are in
two areas in schools - who's teaching my kids, what are they being
taught, are they actually coming out the other end of the system
being able to read, write, count and communicate, and what sort of
values underwrite the education they're getting. The other side of
the equation for the everyday Australian is training and
apprenticeships, and if either my son or daughter gets an
apprenticeship, do they have reasonable training options? But I've
been saying to the audiences to whom I've been speaking, that the
real policy issues in this portfolio at the moment are in
universities and they're in science.
The main agenda, I believe in science is priority setting, and
Minister McGauran and I jointly made an announcement today. We've
got $4.7 billion of public funds which go to all kinds of angles
into research, and there is a decision by the Cabinet to set
priorities in science.
Now you know much more about science than I will ever know, but
this has enormous potential. If we get this right, we actually have
the potential to even more effectively leverage what you have
already done for us in the fields of science, in terms of our
economic, our social and our cultural development, but if we get it
wrong my children and indeed the generation after that will pay a
good price for it.
Within the next few weeks, a paper will be published which will
canvas the issues that relate to research priority setting as we see
them from the perspective of Government. Robin Batterham - the Chief
Scientist, of course - he will chair a consultative panel that will
meet with representative groups to discuss the issues and seek
nominations for priorities.
In late June Robin will report back to me and to the Prime
Minister and to Minister McGauran and we'll go to the Cabinet on
progress that's been made through those consultations.
The finalised framework in priority setting will be released in
mid to late July, after which there'll be written nominations for
priorities and they'll continue to be taken until mid-August and
this is to allow, obviously, individuals and organisations time to
adjust to their nominations as the process unfolds.
Following that an advisory committee will be established at the
end of August to assess the nominated priorities and then I'll take
a short list to Cabinet in late September.
And once Cabinet has determined a final list and brought
guidelines for implementation, relevant agencies will be asked to
develop their own specific implementation plans, and that will be by
the end of December, and I'll expect that I'll take the final
position back to Cabinet in February of next year.
The debate that's going on is that there are some people who say
well - we should get these scientists and tell them to spend our
money on these things, "a, b, c" and there are other who
say, well, I think we should think about the thematic priorities for
Australia. And I just say to you that there's legitimacy in each of
these arguments, but I am a very strong advocate of thematic
priorities. We should have a vision of where we want Australia to
be, economically, scientifically, technologically, socially,
culturally and also (inaudible).
Five or ten years from now, it might be (for example) that we
want Australia to be environmentally sustainable - that we choose
not to live on environmental capital, but instead interest. And then
having set a priority like that, for example, we then decide what
kind of areas do we want to put our research effort into. And as a
part of this process I have insisted that humanities and social
sciences be involved in the priority setting process, which, in the
first instance, in outcomes, will probably involve science,
engineering, technology, and then move on to humanities and social
sciences afterwards. The reason for that is that as important and as
complex what you do in applied science is, it's how we use knowledge
that ultimately determines our destiny as a people - how we relate
to one another and see our place in the world.
So I implore you, I know I don't need to, but I do implore you to
do everything you can to be engaged in this process and to see that
we end up with an outcome which serves the interests of our country
and whatever the final outcome of this is, that we do something
which in no way threatens to damage our future.
I say to young people that when Kennedy was President of the
United States he said that the real struggles for our generation are
against tyranny, disease, poverty and war. And if you put that into
a group of 15 year olds, or thereabouts, and ask them to reflect on
that, of course they say well it's not much different today. And
what you do, you find solutions to some of those - well in fact all
of those - four challenges in different ways. The solution, too,
whether it was Kennedy's generation, or the problems and the
struggles that face our generation, lies in what Thomas Jefferson
said.
He said "education is the defence of the nation"
because it is that more than anything else, which will protect the
next generation from prejudicial fear and ignorance of things that
perhaps we don't always understand, and not only to accept but to
drive the change which we as human beings fear so much in a world
where we can simply no longer hide from the winds of competition and
globalisation.
So thank you very much for having me here this evening. I
consider it a great privilege to be your Minister. The Secretary and
I will do the very, very best we can to juggle your needs and your
priorities with those of the broader Australian community.
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