The fantasy of Australians' collective powers

A very different, generally much blander, picture emerges from the available quantitative evidence. Australians currently produce just under 3 per cent of the world’s scientific papers - impressive, at first glance, for a country that has only a 0.3 per cent of the world’s population, 1 per cent of the world’s trade, and 1 per cent of the world’s economy. However, many of the papers in that 3 per cent represent work conducted in collaboration with overseas researchers. When joint authorships with foreign scientists are taken into account, it turns out that Australia’s share of the world’s scientific articles is really much closer to 2 per cent.

This still compares positively with Australia’s population size: in 2005, the OECD ranked Australia eighth out of all developed countries in terms of the number of research publications produced in proportion to its population. But the argument can also be made that 2 per cent of the world’s scientific output is exactly in line with what one should expect considering the size of the Australian economy. Australia’s economy, after all, is about 2 per cent of the combined economies of all developed nations, where most of the world’s scientific research is performed.

But that’s not all. Moving from papers to patents - another common measure of inventiveness - the picture is even less inspiring. Australians currently own less than 1 per cent of the world’s share of major patent families registered with the world’s three major patent offices: the European Patent Office, the Japanese Patent Office, and the US Patent and Trademark Office. Adjusted for population, that ranks Australia’s ownership of major international patents at a lower level than most of its competitors, with the exception of a handful of countries such as New Zealand, Spain and Ireland.

In fact, accounting for its population, Australia has less than half as many patents granted at the US patent office as does Canada, and less than a third as many as are granted to inventors in Germany, Finland, Sweden, Switzerland, Japan and the US.

Patents are a highly imperfect measure of inventive capacity, since in many businesses new ideas are protected via means other than patenting. Arguably, there is nothing intrinsically wrong with our present patenting levels - probably, once again, they are more or less in line with what you’d expect considering the structure of the Australian economy, which is heavily weighted toward smaller business and toward industries that tend to protect intellectual property in other ways. But the country’s contribution is hardly mind-blowing: it is a very long way from the top performing nations, and it certainly does not indicate an unsurpassed talent for inventive originality.

Though it will disappoint those who continue to believe Australia must be in all things a country of extremes, the quantitative evidence suggests that Australia is neither a uniquely clever country nor, fortunately, a uniquely stupid one. In terms of our fundamental abilities to make new discoveries or to create completely new technologies, Australians are fairly average in performance.