 |
Transcript of Speech
EDITED TRANSCRIPT OF SPEECH, ADDRESS TO THE NATIONAL PRESS
CLUB, CANBERRA, 8 May, 2002
BRENDAN NELSON:
Good afternoon and, thank you Ken. Thank you to the members of
the National Press Club, Professor Chris Fells, Professor David
Denham, Professor Rob Morris - all from the Federation of Australian
Scientific and Technical societies. Dr Hugh Bradlow, thank you to
Telstra and especially my colleagues and my friends, Science
Minister - Minister Peter McGauran, the member for Eden Monaro and
the Chair of the newly established House of Representatives Standing
Committee on Innovation, Gary Nairn, Helen Cross - the member for
Molonglo, and most importantly - members of FASTS and ladies and
gentlemen.
For those Australians, who are watching this today on television
from their homes and workplaces throughout the country, as this
broadcast proceeds you will see that the television cameras will pan
around the room, and I want you to know that the men and women that
you will see here today, who largely come from different threads of
Australia's scientific and educational communities, are men and
women whose heritage that they nurture on a day to day basis and
which they also protect includes 7 Nobel Prizes, 50 Fellows of the
Royal Society, these people publish on our behalf 3% of the world's
scientific papers, though we're only 0.3% of world population. They
publish 5% in geosciences in plant and animal sciences, in ecology
and environment and further to that in mathematics, Australian
scientists are cited 17% more than their colleagues throughout the
world, and that of course is before we even begin to think about
astrophysics and medicine.
There are a number of challenges that have been set this morning
throughout a conference that has been held here today and they
include that we should encourage more young people to pursue careers
in science, that we should increase the levels of scientific
literacy, that our children must be equipped to adjust to
accelerating technological change, to understand that 80% of the
jobs, it is argued, that will exist a decade from now, currently do
not exist. And that school science teachers must be more closely
engaged with the new directions and applications in which their
disciplines are moving, and there has been much more. The thematic
realisation that I think comes to me, if not many other Australians
that emerges from this which we must begin to understand, if not
adjust, is that the haves and have not's, if that's how you wish to
describe people, of tomorrow will be differentiated less by birth,
inheritance, religion, or indeed by good fortune, but instead
increasingly by what they can and cannot do with their minds. In a
prescient address to Harvard University in September 1943 Winston
Churchill said that the "empires of the future would be empires
of the mind", and it was a year later here in Canberra that the
founder of the Liberal of Australia, Sir Robert Menzies to the
founding organisations that came to establish the Liberal Party of
Australia said, in part, "to every good citizen, the state owes
not only a chance in life, but a self-respecting life". In
those two statements by two statesmen from different parts of the
world, a year apart, it's that as much as anything that will inform
what the Government, and I as I am privileged to have the portfolio
of Education, Science and Training, that will inform what we do with
policy over the period that I have the privilege to be in this
position.
I said to the Academy of Science at a dinner on Thursday night
here in Canberra, that I am privileged to represent the electorate
of Bradfield, in Sydney. It's on Sydney's upper north shore, my
electorate - the people whom I represent are amongst the most highly
educated and affluent, throughout the country, though certainly not
universally so. Most of the people that I represent want Australia
to be a republic, they also see Australia in every economic and
cultural sense as being a part of the rest of the world, they
readily embrace the share market, and when they write to me about
information technology issues - it is usually to complain about slow
internet access.
But I say to them, as I've said to people in other parts of the
country, that the further you go from the Opera House, the further
you go from the Melbourne Arts Centre, into the outer suburbs of our
large cities, into some of the regions of Australia, with which Gary
Nairn is very familiar, and most of rural Australia. You will find
that there are many Australians who feel a sense of educational,
technological and financial detachment about which they feel a deep
sense of concern, if not insecurity. Australia has change vastly,
along with the rest of the world from the time that Winston
Churchill went to Harvard, or Robert Menzies founded the Liberal
Party in Australia. And if you think about those changes they are
essentially that Australia, which had been built in agrarian, land
and labour intensive industries, predominantly in the exploitation
of natural resources, now finds itself increasingly, along with
other developed countries, that not only do those traditional
commodities form the economic and social base of Australia today,
and we add value to them, in Science which is a key part of our
challenges to which I'll refer shortly. But increasingly we deal
with the merging industries, in knowledge and information, in
education and biotechnologies and a whole variety of industries that
which they now are, that perhaps only a generation ago, we could
have only dreamed. When you think, for example, that education at
$4.1 billion earns as much for Australia as wheat, and more than
wool - it should inform us to some extent, why people in rural and
regional Australia have been somewhat concerned about some of the
changes which they have seen in their country.
One of my constituents sent me a book just before Christmas in
1997 entitled "Revelation", by a German physicist and
philosopher called Bernhard Philberth - which is more of a career
combination I think we should be encouraging. It's a fairly heavy
theological read about change, how people manage and effect change
individually and institutionally and Philberth 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 a misguided progressivism propel each other
toward a deadly excess, hardly leaving any ground between
them." And I think it's a very good summary about where our
country has been, as it has passed over the critical threshold from
the 20th to the 21st Century, to traditionalists whose values, and
sacrifices and damned hard economic work made the country what it
is, particularly in mining, manufacturing and agriculture, seriously
question whether the 21st Century will be built on the things that
are most important to them, and they should be reassured that it
will. And equally at the other end, the progressivists - perhaps one
or two of whom are in my own electorate, who are seen at times to
want economic and cultural change for its own sake, perhaps not
always understanding, nor worse still even respecting the values of
the traditionalists. What we need to do in thinking about our
future, we need to understand that we have to bring people with us,
including traditionalists in relation to policy in education, and
universities in particular, if we are at the same time, able to
restrain some of the progressivists who promote some extremely
radical thinking.
There are two photographs in my office that inform what I will
seek to do in this portfolio, on your behalf. The first is a black
and white photograph which is the size of the Telstra Address banner
which is hanging at the rear of this room, and it is a photograph of
the late Neville Bonner. Bonner, of course, was the first Aboriginal
Australian elected as a Liberal Queensland Senator to Federal
Parliament, but that is not why it is there. It is there because
Bonner was born on a Government blanket on Eucabar Island in the
mouth of the Tweed River, his mother was not allowed to have a birth
in the city, because it was after dark and she was an Aboriginal
woman. Bonner was denied an education, south of Lismore because the
non-Indigenous parents did not like the idea of him being at the
school. He then finally had a year of education and did three
classes in one year at Beau Desert school, and before he died, he
said that his grandmother had played a key role in his life, and she
said to him that if he learned to read and write and communicate and
treated people with respect and decency, it would take him a long
way, and it did. Just before he arrived in the Federal Senate, he
said of his experience of this world that there were two things that
were always in greater need - one was human compassion and the other
was understanding. That photograph sits right in front of my desk.
The other photograph, which is a more recent one, which sits
immediately behind my desk, is a photograph of me with a young woman
called Tara Thompson. Tara Thompson left school, a place called
Hallet Cove in the southern suburbs of Adelaide at the age of 14
having missed 33 of the last 50 days of her schooling, and she was
picked up having had all sorts of personal hassles (I won't describe
exactly what she said to me when she spoke), but she was picked up
by the Hallet Cove Youth Pathways program, for which Geoff Spring
(who is here today) should take some credit, which is run along with
Commonwealth and State programs in the southern suburbs of Adelaide.
The reason her photograph is there, is because having got through a
whole lot of personal adversities, different in many ways from, but
still similar in others to those that were faced by Bonner, she'd
done a first aid certificate of which she is as proud as I am of my
medical education, to which Professor Ian Chubb contributed, and
also she is now undertaking a TAFE course and she said that it
"put my life back on track". She said "I would have
been a bum without it".
Our vision of education and of training should be, that it's
something that begins not long after we are born and it continues
throughout our lives, that all people, young and not so young, but
in this case in particular, our children, should be encouraged to
understand the importance of education and training, and the
difference between the two, and the importance of the difference. We
encourage them to remain at school for as long as they are able, to
understand that the education will provide them with resilience for
life, and a part of that resilience in acquiring skills is to
realise that those skills will have a limited life and they need to
be upgraded, or indeed changed,as I'm sure Steve Balzary would have
spoken to you about earlier this morning.
We want all Australians to see universities and higher education
as a part of their life horizon, in terms of their educational and
career choices and to understand the importance that a university
education confers which is not only an economic one. But equally,
for the Tara Thompsons and others throughout Australia, the 70% of
kids who do not go immediately from school to higher education, that
when they make choices, that they understand they have a choice, and
they make choices in apprenticeships and traineeships or to go to
TAFE, or to undertake training with a private vocational education
and training provider, that any one of those choices does not mean
that their lives and their career and educational choices confer on
them a value as human beings that is less important than those that
go to university. One of the things that I think all of us need to
understand, if not as parents, as educators or those of us who would
like to be, is that one of the problems with our modern society,
despite the fact per capita wealth in this country is five times
higher than it was when Henry Parkes gave the Tenterfield oration
over a century ago, and perhaps we're not five times as happy. One
of the things we need to understand is that the next generation is
still very much tethered to a value system that says that if they
work hard, they should do better than their parents' generation, and
a part of that is that often, as parents, or as society or policy
makers, we tell young Australians in all kinds of ways that success
is measured in narrow terms, that it's a mobile phone, fashionable
clothes, outstanding result in your year 12, and a BMW. And in some
way if you don't aspire to those things, or indeed achieve any or
all of them, that in some way you have failed. If scratch away the
surface of the kids that we're picking up in our New Apprenticeships
Access Programs or any one of a range of things that are trying to
re-engage young people and boys in particular, with education and
training, you will find that one of the things is that they work out
before us, that they are being forced at times to do things to which
in their hearts they feel they are not suited.
For a scientific audience in particular, it doesn't just apply in
terms of apprenticeship or university choices. Max Plank won the
Nobel Prize for physics in 1918. The physicists amongst you know
precisely what I'm talking about. In later life, Plank recalled that
as a young man in 1874 at the age of 16 he'd been encouraged away
from physics towards biology by his teacher Phillip von Jolly, and
Plank said and I quote "As I was beginning to study physics and
sought advice regarding the prospects of my studies from my eminent
teacher, he depicted physics as a highly developed and virtually
full grown science which would soon assume its stable form, perhaps
in this or that corner there would still be some minor detail to
check out and co-ordinate, but the system as a whole stood
relatively secure, and theoretical physics was fast approaching that
degree of completeness with geometry for example which had already
achieved for hundreds of years.
And of course it was 26 years later in 1900 that Max Plank
introduced a new formula into physics - Plank's Law - from which the
whole of quantum physics would subsequently be derived and which
revolutionised our understanding of the world and to which today we
owe the invention of the transistor, the laser, the personal
computer, the CD player, the mobile phone, the internet and so many
other extraordinary pieces of technology which have changed our
lives.
One of the key areas for policy reform in this term of
Government, I believe as the Minister, should be in higher
education. That is not for one minute to assume that the Government
feels that its tasks in standards of teaching and curriculum
development and professional development in schools is finished, in
fact far from it. Nor is it to suggest that in some way, national
consistency of training packages and contestable markets and putting
more vocational education and training into schooling is in anyway
finished - far from it. But the sort of society in which my children
will be living, will be determined not by the things that we know,
but by the things that we don't.
It's interesting - when I had the privilege to open the Tweed
Heads Campus of the Southern Cross University about three weeks ago,
I made an observation to the audience of 60 or so that were there,
the campus of course specialises in information, communication
technology and interactive video teleconferencing and other pieces
of technology especially important in the regions. I made the
observation that a century ago, we would have been opening train
lines and there probably would, even a century ago, have been at
least 2,000 people there, because that generation of Australians
understood, as indeed does the current one, the importance of rail
infrastructure for the economic and social development of Australia
through the 20th Century. But right along transport infrastructure
today, in fact some would argue even ahead of it in importance, the
rail lines for the 21st Century are predominantly in education, in
information, and especially (I believe) in higher education. The
reason why universities need to undertake reform is not because
there is some predetermined agenda, to which I have been given to
implement, it is not about - so much - what will happen in
Australian universities next year, but it's about how will
Australian higher education serve the interests of Australia, a
decade or two decades from now. Do we have a policy framework which
will deliver the ambitions that we have, and I suggest to you that
we do not.
I said to the Academy of Science on Thursday night, whilst I
understand that people in the sector speak of a crisis, of crises, I
just repeat again, the university sector has $20 billion of fixed
assets available to it, $4.4 billion in liquid assets, $10.4 billion
in revenues this year - almost $2 billion increase over the past 5
years. The borrowings of the sector at $426 million which is 2% of
asset value. That is not to suggest in any way that there aren't
problems, and indeed in a relative sense serious problems facing the
higher education sector, I wouldn't be here talking to you today if
I didn't think there were problems to be addressed. But higher
education disengages itself from where the average everyday
Australian is, when it speaks about a crisis. The people whose hard
work funds the $6.1 billion of public funds going into universities
this year, it's frequently removed from low incomes, from small
business people working their tails off to survive, who are living
in parts of Australia where entire industries have changed, where in
the process of change many people have found themselves displaced
from work and retraining, partly due to your hard work, I might
add, for new careers. If you want to talk about a crisis, I would
suggest that for a start, where only a quarter of Aboriginal
Australians in some parts of Arnhem Land attend school, I put that
in the crisis category. When only 16 of 378 Aboriginal kids outside
Darwin or Alice Springs can pass a basic year 3 reading test, I put
that in the crisis category. And then I come back from there and the
first constituent I see is outraged because his son couldn't get a
place in Veterinary Science and has to satisfy himself with
engineering. Now that's not to trivialise the concerns of any of us,
or our ambitions for our children, but please when you talk about
crises put it in some perspective. You want to go to the inner west
- the Exodus Foundation where Reverend Bill Crews, when he's not
looking after prostitutes, feeding the poor or trying to keep drug
addicts alive, with Macquarie University out the back of the church
is making up time in lost literacy. When a kid can spend 5 years in
the education system and says "Oh, it's the black stuff you
read", I put that in the crisis category. I do not put the
issues facing Australian higher education in the crisis category,
but neglectful indifference today will mean that a decade or so from
now, the next generation may well be describing it in those terms.
The issues are how do we define a university?
Allan Gilbert told me
that for the first 800 years, universities didn't do research, now
the last thing we want to do is go back to the future, but to what
extent does research, scholarship and teaching define a university?
And what kinds of research is appropriate to be undertaken in
different kinds of institutions? University of New England doing
outstanding research in rural futures, in wool, in beef. Charles
Sturt University, outstanding research in dairy production and in
wine manufacturing and exporting, critically important not just to
Australia, but for the regional, economic development, but there are
other forms of research that go on throughout the sector. One Vice
Chancellor said to me, in criticising a fellow institution, he said
"They're not very good there - they spend too much time on
teaching", well I've got to say to you on behalf of the
Australians who are not here, but the Australian students who are
wanting to go to Australian universities, they place a higher
priority on teaching. Universities should be about scholarship and
teaching and research, but I think increasingly we need to - perhaps
- be thinking about those whose needs we're endeavouring to meet.
Who is going to university and why do they go there? Why is it that
attrition rates for indigenous students, for example, are
approaching 60%. Where have we got attrition rates and why do we
have them? We know that four out of ten don't complete, one of those
four comes back to it. Why is it that half of the three who never
complete leave in the first year, why do they leave? If we can even
deal with a part of that demand problem we'll have additional places
already for the 52,000 who didn't get a place this year. We need to
look at governance and administration, how are the institutions
governed and managed? Are those structures appropriate for the 21st
Century when you're running a $3 - 400 million operation? They are
issues for which States and Territories are responsible. The last
thing that any State Minister wants is the Commonwealth to tell him
or her what to do, but I believe as Australians whatever our
politics or the jurisdiction of our Government, it is time to look
at the governance arrangements and other issues with a view to
saying - is this the best model for servicing the interests of
higher education? I also think the Commonwealth department, and I
mean this affectionately to my Secretary, Dr Shergold who is an
outstanding public servant, but I think the extent to which we
regulate universities, the way in which we require endless amount of
reporting and accounting and data collection, I remain to be
convinced that it is all necessary. That the universities themselves
should be spending more of that effort on teaching and research, and
less on reporting to our Commonwealth educational politbureau.
The commercialisation of intellectual property in the sector, in
some institutions is done exceedingly well, that cannot be said
universally throughout it. One of the things I am determined to
drive out of this is to see that we have a sound policy framework
for commercialising ideas and researchers, as much as universities
should have some equity in that intellectual property, and I'd also
add that one of the things we should be thinking about is to what
extent can we link revenue streams from commercialising intellectual
property and science engineering and technology to supporting
humanities, fine arts, philosophy, language and literature and all
of the things that, ultimately, define who we are as a society.
Further to that I would also suggest to you, in us thinking about
the public policy debate, if we can get more private sector or
industry investment in university infrastructure, and indeed in
commercialising intellectual property in areas that find it easy to
attract it, I'd suggest to you we might then have some public funds
available to support those areas in humanities and social sciences
that are just so important to defining our future.
The other problem that I see which is fundamental to the reform
process is specialisation. I think that at the moment we are running
a funding and a policy framework which encourages, doesn't
discourage universities, but encourages universities to be all
things to all people. To run a smorgasbord for everybody, instead of
(shall I say) a more defined a la carte menu for the particular
market need, that needs to be met. One university runs 167 courses,
96 of the courses have less than 5 students enrolled. 20% of the
units on offer in Australian higher education have fewer than 5
enrolees, 4,200 have only 1, in some cases there are very good
arguments for that, but is it possible for us to create a funding
framework which puts a floor under regional universities, which
meets the funding obligations to their complex and onerous community
service obligations, at the same time as facilitating course
rationalisation and collaboration between universities so that you
can enrol in one institution and do, for example, 30% of your course
work through another institution. So, in other words, not reducing
funding at all. In fact I would argue, actually making it easier to
deliver need at the same point as having a degree of deregulation
which might enable one or two institutions to aspire reasonably to
be in the top league table, however that might reasonably be
defined.
The last, but certainly not in terms of importance, issue that I
just want to cover before I conclude. This is not an issue which is
on the front page of the newspapers, not even the broadsheets, which
surprises me. Perhaps Michelle might change that. It is priority
setting in science. We have been going through a process in
Government, Minister McGauran and myself and my colleagues, looking
at the $4.7 billion of public funds which supports research in
Australia, and we are looking at a process for setting priorities in
research and the Cabinet has agreed to the release of an issues
paper which will be released shortly, and that issues paper, that
discussion paper will inform what will be a process of public
engagement and discussion, headed principally by Minister McGauran
over the rest of this year. The issues paper will look at
philosophical and practical issues, the Chief Scientist - Robin
Batterham and a consultative panel will canvas the views of you and
many others throughout the Australian community and seek nominations
for priorities in research, we expect by the end of June that the
Chief Scientist will report to Minister McGauran, myself and the
Prime Minister and we will go to Cabinet and then following in
mid-July we're expecting that we will release a finalised framework
for priority setting with further written nominations that will be
received
[tape change]
priorities and I will take a short list of those priorities to
Cabinet and once a final list has been determined with guidelines
for implementation, the relevant agencies will be asked to develop
their own implementation plans.
There are some key questions that need to be asked, what are
Australia's areas of strength, of opportunity and of need, secondly
how might priorities be implemented without disruptive intervention,
with disruption of management or indeed management complexity or
indeed with unrealistic haste? How do we integrate science,
engineering and technology with social sciences and humanities in a
research priority setting process? And I see this as a great
opportunity. We have an opportunity through Government and through
you, through the Prime Minister, in particular to get this right,
and to make an enormous investment that will pay off for the next
generation. But if we don't get this right, we potentially could
also do a great deal of harm. I see this as an opportunity for us to
embrace a vision of where want Australia to be, where to we want
Australia to be placed, economically, environmentally, culturally -
five or ten or even fifteen years from now, and then perhaps set
research priorities that would deliver that outcome. For example, a
priority could be, enabling a sustainable environment - it could be
a theme. There is a debate for example - should we put our research
priorities into specific disciplines or instead should we be putting
our research priorities into two, three, four or five themes for the
future. I'm arguing, as best I am able, that I think we ought to be
thinking about both. That we can set thematic priorities for our
country which then feed very much, into a discipline specific
priority setting process. So if we had, for example, looking at
Australia having a sustainable environment - if that was a theme
with a policy objective that development should aim to meet the
needs of Australians today, whilst conserving our eco-systems for
the benefit of future generations. In other words, that we might set
a priority that sees us living on environmental interest instead of
capital, then we would be looking at dry land salinity, efficient
and renewable energy sources, managing eco-systems, sustainable
production for example. The sort of disciplines that then might be
involved in priority setting would be biotechnology, mathematics,
informatics, environmental engineering, social and water science,
geoscience, fuel engineering and of course social sciences. How do
we as human beings adapt to the priorities that we might have set
for ourselves as a nation?
So, I suppose in concluding, what we're talking about is a
revolution of the sort that was referred to by JJ Thompson in 1916,
who of course discovered the electron, and there needs to be a
revolution in our understanding of the role of science and
technology research in shaping the future of this nation. We
understood it in relation to rail lines for the 20th Century, we
still understand that very much today, but all of us - it doesn't
matter where live, where we work, what our aspirations are in
education or anything else - we need to understand that our children
will not only be working in areas based, as I say, in the
exploitation of natural resources but they will also increasingly be
working with their minds, as much as their hands.
In concluding I just remind you that Thomas Jefferson was the
third President of the United States of America, Jefferson was asked
what were the three things for which he wanted to be remembered, and
put on his gravestone. He said that the first was co-authoring the
American Declaration of Independence, the second was the Virginia
Statute for religious freedom, and the third - the founding of the
University of Virginia. When asked why that would be the case, he
said because "Education is the defence of the nation",
what will defend my children most against prejudicial fear and
ignorance of change. In fact what will enable them most to drive
change in a world that's coalescing into three major trading blocks,
when we represent only 1% of world trade and 6% of APEC is
education. That is the key, and my task is to convince you to help
me convince my colleagues that education is very much an investment
and perhaps not an expenditure, thank you.
|
