Ockham's Razor - ABC Radio National

There has been a curious mismatch between science and politics in Australia. Nowhere is this more evident than when one is incarcerated in Parliament House in rooms without windows, is prevented from speaking with the outside world on pain of imprisonment and tries to make sense out of a mountain of paper.

That is the annual Lockup for the Federal Budget, an grind for reporters charged with bringing the good news to a breathless public at the moment the Treasurer gets to his feet in the House of Representatives to give a speech we have read six hours earlier.

The government of the day gets a generally positive press. The media have a field day and the whole circus of spruiking, reacting and reporting is over before the week is out.

As you hear this, the Budget is old news. But its effect lasts for at least a year - a decade in the case of this Budget as it drives us down the one-way GST road. It warrants close analysis, not only for the numbers it announces but for what its priorities tell the nation about itself.

So what’s this about a mismatch between science and politics in Australia? Well, for the past three years, the first week of May has been dubbed National Science Week. If you’re a regular listener and viewer of ABC programs, you could hardly have missed the series of events around the country. More scientists than ever before have been explaining their work and ideas to the public in ever more inventive ways.

Now, the government supports National Science Week with some modest, but necessary, funding. The aim is not to make a flash in the pan but to raise a lasting awareness in the community of the value of science. Yet, the timing is not good.

Budgets are largely formulated three months earlier and Science Week is much too late to influence political priorities. Any momentum it has built is lost when Budget week follows immediately, and, as happened in the last two years, there’s been disillusionment when the government delivered a further cut to funding for the very activity it was helping to promote only a few days earlier.

This year’s Budget produced no cuts - and some lobbyists might see this as an achievement - but the increases provided in the Budget papers were so small as to be barely noticeable, and therefore, will be of no value in raising awareness. You have to look and listen hard in the media for any mention of science and technology.

The five Budgets of the Coalition stand in stark contrast to the monumental increases for R&D and universities in countries like Canada, Eire and Finland - of the order of billions of dollars - let alone the big players of the USA, Japan, Britain, Germany and France with whom Australia has to compete.

A standstill Budget like this year’s may be represented as a springboard for a pre-election spree next year. But, in the meantime, Australia will have slid inexorably down the league table of nations that depend on innovation, based on R&D, for sustaining - or better - for improving their competitive position.

The Treasurer, Mr Costello, asks us to see his fifth Budget as building for Australia’s future. In his first Budget he said the government was repairing the economic damage they accused Paul Keating of leaving behind. Back in 1996, the agenda seemed clear.

To satisfy business and that mysterious entity called "the market", vigorous cuts to spending were presented as the solution. Universities and industry were sacrificial targets. Research and development - R and D - were not priorities in the Coalition’s "vision" for the future. They were not seen as the essential springboards for innovation.

Building capacity in higher education and industry needs decades of constant nourishment. It cannot be built in a day. But, it can be heavily damaged through the decisions in the one day of a Budget and they last for decades. And our young people get the message - when it comes to choosing a career, science is not cool; it sucks.

Experiencing the Lockups sure drives home the political reality of how peripheral science has been in the current political scene.

The first challenge is to uncover what that mountain of papers and news releases is really telling us; that is assuming that the authors had a lucid idea of what they wanted to achieve.

Science and technology, research and development are distributed among several portfolios and changes in how their reports are presented have achieved a high level of obscurity. For example, there are many fewer tables that once tracked clearly the changes over past years and projected to the future.

There are now almost no charts in Budget Paper No 1. Once upon a time, the major recipients of research funds were listed separately.

It was only through persistent questioning of officials in the Lockup (by the way, they are allowed to use the telephone) that I could confidently quote the indicators of support for R&D across the major portfolios, that is, Education, Health, and Industry, Science and Resources.

In preparing to cover this Budget I canvassed the major research bodies and asked for their top five priorities. In the Lockup, I ticked their wish lists off against what was presented. This did not lead to an encouraging few hours.

Many of the respondents referred to the admission by Education Minister, Dr David Kemp, in his submission to Cabinet that universities do have a funding crisis. Now, that’s the submission that was dramatically leaked, caused a public outcry and forced Cabinet to sink it.

The tone of the scientists was: "What new things can we say to shift government attitudes, when Australia’s major competitors overseas have moved so positively in the opposite direction?".

The Australian Vice-Chancellors’ Committee sounded almost despairing: "We are not putting a special priority in this Budget on anything because the government has made it clear that it’s not using it to remedy the financial crisis in universities".

But, the Australian Academy of Science still hoped for "increased funding of university research, based on effective measurement of outcomes and outputs of research".

Neither found any comfort in the Budget.

The Australian Academy of Technological Sciences and Engineering stressed the need to revisit the question of tax concessions for industrial R&D and they made a detailed case for adapting the scheme of tax credits that seems to be working successfully in Canada.

But, there’s been no movement in the Budget following the government’s big Innovation Summit in February. An Agenda Implementation Group is meeting.

The Australian and New Zealand Association for the Advancement of Science was seeking "a long-term vision and some strategic plans" and these would include funding for university salaries, marine and environmental science and would address "the big looming crisis of the shortage of science teachers".

The Federation of Australian Scientific and Technological Societies also sought more funds "to salvage the Australian research base" and to cure what they described as the "powerful disincentive to new teachers of science and mathematics".

None of these pressing issues received attention or mention in the Budget.

The National Tertiary Education Union, sought hundreds of millions of dollars for increases in salaries for hard-pressed academics, and, similar to last year’s boost for medical research, urged increased support for other fields of research.

Both bodies are discouraged by the Budget.

Medical research was the only bright spot to receive significant extra funding - of $49 million. That was not news as it was scheduled in last year’s Budget and there will be progressive increases for another four years. The plight of other sciences like physics, chemistry, biology and mathematics, however, has not been recognized.

Two Vice-Chancellors told me they believe the run-down in numbers and expertise in the Department of Education has much to do with their inability to even perceive the nature of the problems, let alone to have them corrected in Budgetary terms.

Dr Kemp had been telling everyone that universities will have to depend on the private sector to pick up the tab left by the government and a trip across the Tasman to copy the market-driven policies of New Zealand had been mandatory for Australian ministers.

But, how realistic would it be to become dependent on support from bodies that are dropping their own commitment to R&D due to disincentives by government? And how reliable would they be as benefactors when they’re subject to market forces that drive wild swings in the share market and the value of currency?

Back to the Budget!

And "new technology" does not mean the craziness of share prices for the dot.com companies, or the purchase of computers and mobile phones which are made overseas. It does mean vibrant Australian-owned industries that generate genuinely innovative products and processes from a solid commitment to local research.

As this suggestion came from its mates in the market, is it possible the government will hear their message and act before the next Budget?

Well, just before I recorded this talk, the government released its Science and Technology Budget Statement and said that there had been an increase in spending on R&D across the board. That did not appear in the Budget papers. So, we’ll need to do yet another analysis to separate fact from hype.

ROBYN WILLIAMS:

Peter Pockley writes for Australasian Science magazine and the journal Nature.