 Political Corrections
with Margo Kingston
Is it too late for Australian science?
"We believed that every problem could be solved by the unrestrained operation of market behaviour and some naive notion that trickle-down economics from that unrestrained operation would solve every problem."
So said John Howard, in speech on April 15, 2000.
Thanks to Australian Financial Review reporter Tony Walker, who reported the remark, we have on record the closest Howard has come to an ideological mea culpa.
What Howard didn't mention is the destruction that that naivety - by Labor and Liberal governments - has wreaked on our research and development, the CSIRO and our great universities which housed much of it. Howard's innovation statement this year, Backing Australia's Ability, amounted to an apology for an ideology gone terribly wrong.
Labor reduced university funding by 15 percent and made students pay for the privilege of a lower quality education. The Liberals crunched another 6 percent out, and - incredibly - imposed a financial disincentive to train as a scientist or engineer by charging an extra HECS fee for the privilege.
Far fewer students now study science at high school and the proportion of students studying the core sciences - physics, chemistry and maths - has collapsed. Our R&D spending, already low by OECD standards, fell and kept falling after 1996 because the government downgraded R&D tax incentives.
The ideology holds that government should get out of funding higher education and R&D.
Market forces would see universities attract the private funds it needed to maintain research. Overseas fee paying students (and what logic is this - set out to destroy our huge education export industry by reducing the quality of education?) would limit the fall out.
Market short-termism to replace public long-term investment in Australia's future? Naïve is a polite word.
Now, after the market has comprehensively failed to take the place of government in research and development, public investment returns, but only if we corporatise the scientist. There is no longer room for them to pursue knowledge for its own sake for the benefit of the public, which funds them. The new head of the Australian Research Council, Peter Wills, says scientists must learn to read a balance sheet and learn the language of the market to get the cash.
Performance indicators, outcomes focus, benchmarks - you know the score.
With that, of course, comes nightmare pressures to compromise ethics and subvert the traditional goal of science - the quest for truth. Privatised, commodified knowledge means pressures on scientists to compromise their ethics.
If we must give up the ideal of the purity of the scientific endeavour to succeed in a free market world, and financial accountability is an must, it's obvious strong codes of conduct must be built to protect the profession and the public. Both financial and ethical are vital prerequisites for public funding, right?
When Peter Quiddington, writer for Australian Science and Technology Online, raised this imperative with Wills after a speech to the national press club on Tuesday during Science meets Politics week, he was told this was a minor matter without priority.
The National Health and Medical Research Council, which doles out public cash for medical research, has strict ethical codes on research on humans. If they're not met, the offending scientist and the institution they work for is defunded. The NHMRC is going further, publishing draft "national principles on the management of intellectual property in the commercialisation of publicly funded research".
The ARC, which will now dole out much public cash for non-medical research once it corporatises and refocuses on commercially-oriented research, drafted a paper called In the National Interest: Commercialising Research in Australia, recommending a strong top down approach to enforcing ethics, including conflicts of interest - like in the United States - on the research it funded. Its recommendations were stripped and the report gutted.
I followed up Peter's question, and was also fobbed off. Peter and I were then swamped with scientists detailing the ethical minefields they were trying to negotiate.
Professor Rosemary Ryall, professor of urological research at Flinders Medical Centre, told me the NHMRC code was "a powerful inbuilt incentive" to get it right, that she and others used to ensure their work was uncompromised, and that the basic sciences would be crazy not to follow suit.
There's not just a naïve belief in the economic trickle down effect of the market at work here, there's the naive belief that values which can't be valued in money terms but which are the only priceless assets individuals and the societies they live in posses will somehow triumph without help.
Peter Wills told me later the ARC was doing some work in the area.
Let's hope he makes it a top priority.
Email: mkingston@mail.fairfax.com.au
Margo's web diary - www.smh.com.au/news/opinion/webdiary/
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