Peter Doherty: What could CSIRO and other government research agencies like DSTO (Defence Science and Technology Organisation), ANSTO do better to promote greater economic activity?
Donald Hector: CSIRO and ANSTO, and particularly CSIRO, are much maligned. They’ve created very innovative inventions over the years, and have been responsible for some truly fantastic technological developments.
But we expect them to deliver success with every project, and research is not like that. We also expect them to do so on shoestring budgets. There’s nothing worse than funding a project that might be expected to cost $50 million and finding out that it needs twice that, and then saying that you don’t have the money to continue and killing the program.
I’m not suggesting that we should be trying to pick winners, nor am I suggesting that we should hesitate in killing off research programs that aren’t going to deliver. But you’ve got make sure that you focus your funding on areas that are likely to be a success, kill off the programs in the early stages when they look like they’re not going to succeed, and heavily fund the ones that show potential until they are successful, recognising that that usually takes a lot more money than you originally expected.
Peter Doherty: What are the barriers from the business side?
Donald Hector: What Australian companies, particularly the top 300 of the ASX, have historically done is to have very strong government lobby groups and the Australian governments, irrespective of their political persuasion, have been very heavily persuaded by them.
What I think that’s led to is a lack of entrepreneurship. We lack a mittelstand in Australia of the type they have in Germany. I think there are about three million often relatively small, family-owned companies in Germany that typically that have a few hundred employees and they’re world leaders in a niche area. They supply world marketplaces and the big German manufacturing sector. We’ve never developed that here because we’ve been to eager too look after the larger companies that feel that the Australian government owes them a living.
Peter Doherty: What can government do better? Are the tax settings right?
Donald Hector: I’m not sure that a general tax policy in terms of support for industry is a good idea. We certainly need research and development concessions. We need to have some public funding to encourage research and development expenditure, and we’ve got to recognise that issue and provide tax incentives to encourage it.
If you look at the US, a lot of the high-tech industries there have their origins in defence industry. It’s not uncommon to find engineering faculties in the US universities with hundreds of millions of dollars from government research funding for defence.
If Australia decided to be a much bigger player in agriculture and mining where we have some very clear internationally competitive industries, why aren’t we more fully integrated into those industries? Why aren’t we the manufacturers of agricultural and mining equipment as we were once?
Why was the government response to the car industry crisis not more visionary? We could have taken the several hundred millions of dollars of car industry subsidies and made that money available to a couple of the big earth-moving companies like Caterpillar and Komatsu to establish their global research and development and world-scale manufacturing facilities here.
I am of the view that you need government policy to encourage the development of those industries, but you have to do so in a way that will be internationally competitive and will lead to a globally-competitive industry for the long term.
Peter Doherty: What are you aiming to achieve by re-invigorating the Royal Society of NSW, and how do you see such long-established institutions functioning in modern Australia?
Donald Hector: We want the Royal Society of New South Wales to be true to its original charter of encouraging studies and investigations in science, art, literature and philosophy. The main aim behind that is to advance knowledge and encourage innovation and entrepreneurship to develop the resources of New South Wales and, more broadly, of Australia.
We see our role as providing a forum where we can bring together people who are interested in seeing those things happen and being a facilitator so that we can bring important issues to public attention and to influence policy. We want to provide a place for people to meet who are engaged in those areas of human knowledge, for them to exchange ideas and to learn from one another.
Peter C. Doherty is a laureate professor at the University of Melbourne. Donald Hector is the president of the Royal Society of New South Wales.
This article was originally published at The Conversation. Read the original article
