Gambling with science policy

Nor will the huge challenges Australia now faces in energy, water, sustainable food production, landscape degradation and species loss be solved by the present piecemeal attempts to commercialise R&D. If there is logic to public funding of research, it surely exists at this level - but science policy has, inexplicably, wandered off the pitch.

The Commission endorses the idea of the Rural R&D Corporations. These are one of the few really smart things Australia has done in science policy in the past 40 years and the mystery is why people keep wanting to close them, instead of cloning the model - a public dollar for a private dollar - in other sectors of the economy like energy, water, IT, communications, biomedical, sustainable production, environmental cleanup and so on.

A little startling was the Commission’s claim that government and industry agencies had apparently chorused “underfunding isn’t a problem”. Bulldust. Spend five minutes in any research institution in the country and you can soon find out otherwise. The current rejection of 80 per cent of ARC grant applications speaks volumes.

This is simply another manifestation of the cowing of Australian science. Everyone knows the penalty for speaking out is to be shot on Budget Night. The only reason the government has been able to maintain ineffectual science policy so long is that it has successfully hushed comment on it.

If scientists do not feel free to speak their minds on science, or on science policy, Australia is the loser. As a democracy we will be guided by fictions rather than facts in our public debate.

History is littered with nations which deceived themselves.