Are you reading this piece using wi-fi? You wouldn’t be if Australian scientists had not invented technology that wirelessly connects computers, TV sets and phones across the planet.
Australian science has led to the development of Relenza – the first drug successful in treating the flu - meaning that fewer Australians suffer or die from it every year. In a typical Australian winter, around 1,500 deaths are attributed to the influenza virus.
Australian science has given us climate-ready crops. Crops that will make sure families can continue to place basic food items on the table despite changing weather patterns. Crops that give us wheat to export when other nations fall short, and that keep our balance-of-trade figures looking vaguely respectable.
Australian science feeds our economy and gives a country like Australia, with less than 0.5 per cent of the world’s population, the edge we need to compete and stand on our own two feet.
Australian science has even improved Anna Bligh’s chance of re-election in 2012. Through the tumult of January, the floods then Cyclone Yasi, Anna Bligh showed leadership.
Hour after hour, day after day she delivered accurate briefings that saved lives. Why? Because the Bureau of Meteorology, one of Australia’s esteemed scientific organisations were critical in giving her the facts and figures she needed to respond to the impending disaster. Years of data collections and analysis of trends paid off.
The Bureau of Meteorology runs on a shoe string yet the work done by its scientists touches the lives of all Australians, every day – be it in newspapers, on radio, or on the nightly TV news.
Another of Australia’s premier scientific organisations, the CSIRO, also runs on a shoestring. In the 2010/11 Federal Budget they lost 129 staff members. This situation is not new. For years CSIRO have had to do more with less. For weeks CSIRO scientists have been taking industrial action after failing to win a modest pay rise. It’s about time.
Most Australians would be broadly aware of CSIRO – perhaps it is best known for its diet books, perhaps as that organisation that delivers Australian science, but few would be aware of specific innovations produced by them. It’s not widely known that it was CSIRO scientists who developed technology used in wi-fi connections installed in computers around the globe.
Even fewer would be aware of the income this innovation delivers to the Australian economy.
It is this sort of return on investment that the Gillard Government, committed to the productivity agenda, should embrace. Yet CSIRO scientists are forced to take industrial action to have their contribution to the economy and society duly recognised.
The Labor Government has increased funding for the science and innovation sector by 34 per cent, and we know most of that funding has gone towards research infrastructure – indisputably a worthwhile investment.
But the next challenge is to increase the size of the research workforce and provide the profession with job security - a key factor in workforce retention and essential to delivering quality research.
As the recent Excellence in Research for Australia (ERA) process demonstrated, world-leading results are in fields enjoying consistent support over the medium to long term, rather than stop/start funding.
Lack of job security is not limited to scientists in CSIRO. Too many Federation of Australian Scientific and Technological Societies members recount their journey on what is best known at the post-doctoral treadmill – years spent jumping from grant to grant trying to gain promotion to the ever-elusive academic post that can offer a little more recognition.
But even at more senior levels a researcher’s job is still only as secure as their next research grant.
With more than 70 per cent of health and medical research workforce already missing out on project grants and threats to cut $400 million from the National Health and Medical Research budget come May, the future is hardy looking bright.
It’s a cruel irony that Australia – in the midst of a mining boom made possible by technology developed by scientists enabling exploration and processing of precious minerals; and in the midst of the biggest roll out of optic fibre made possible by the work of physicists – is failing to reward the women and men who make innovation and the productivity agenda possible.
President Barrack Obama in his most recent State of the Union address mentioned science five times, innovation nine times and technology nine times. His words were backed with substantial funding increases to American science.
In straitened financial circumstances, the conservative PM of Britain, David Cameron, quarantined the science budget from cuts acknowledging that sectors that deliver economic growth need more, not less investment. Yet in Australia science is still treated as a cost, not an investment.
The need for Australian science to inform critical decisions about our economic and social well-being is not diminishing.
Like the data that allowed Anna Bligh to save lives, we need world-class scientists to continue to work in Australia so informed decisions can be made about how we transition to a low carbon economy, and how we keep health expenditure in check.
The solutions to lowering greenhouse gas emissions and the solutions to fighting cancer do not lie in the Australian Parliament, nor in high polluting industries, they lie in the minds and work of scientists across the globe.
What the Australian Government must decide is whether it invests in those people and those solutions. Surely it shouldn’t have to come to industrial action for logic to prevail.
Anna-Maria Arabia is the CEO of FASTS, Australia’s peak body in science and technology representing more than 68,000 scientists Australia-wide.
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