Professor Chennupati Jagadish AC PresAA RSEng FTSE
News that the government has fired the starting gun on its review into how Australia can strengthen its research and development (R&D) system could not have come soon enough.
For years, Australia’s R&D system has been groaning under the weight of 14 government portfolios and 151 programs that, whilst well-intentioned, overlap and struggle to support our scientists, entrepreneurs and companies to create jobs or build economic resilience at the scale the country desperately needs.
The consequence of this lack of coordination across portfolios and across sectors is plain to see. Australian inventions are commercialised offshore, incentives for business and philanthropy to invest in Australian R&D are insufficient or non-existent, we stood at the back of the supply chain queue during the pandemic, and we no longer adequately nurture the creative spirit that is essential to discovery and that is the essential precursor to commercialisation.
As a nation, we are falling behind the pack in our investment in R&D. In fact, we have gone from being about average amongst OECD countries for overall investment in R&D to hurtling towards the bottom of the pack with no prospect of halting that decline, let alone reversing it.
While rumblings of a global recession become louder, and Australia’s growth in GDP slows to a crawl, there has never been a more important time to use the R&D lever to kick-start productivity growth, to diversify our economy, and set the nation on a path driven by Australian smarts.
We desperately need to create the conditions to bring to bear the full power of the research and development to meet our national ambitions, secure our borders and assure our global competitiveness.
Economists have long recognised that a nation’s human capital — its stock of educated people and its ideas — are central to building the complexity and prosperity of our country and providing for the wellbeing and security of our citizens.
We can no longer afford duplication, nor can we let a workforce that is skilled and able to meet national ambitions languish as they compete for a diminishing pool of funds and operate in a system that is fragmented, lacking in strategy and drowning in bureaucracy.
We live in a region with escalating geopolitical tensions, in a moment of unprecedented global competitiveness and in a world less open to knowledge exchange than before.
The Australian future depends on its R&D enterprise because it can no longer rely on importing knowledge, technologies and a foreign trained workforce.
The strategic examination of R&D must deliver a roadmap that clearly shows us the structures, systems, incentives and connections we need to bring to bear the full power of R&D to power our nation.
This is a once-in-a-generation opportunity to look collectively at the future we want and need for Australia and to prepare for it now.
The examination must be brave. It must be radical. And it must create an R&D enterprise fit for today’s needs.
Importantly, we must get this right because: businesses ready to grow and innovate rely on it; an economy vulnerable to shocks needs diversification; we need to decarbonise our economy faster before the impacts of climate change cripple us entirely; we have no choice but to accelerate the Defence technology critical to protect our borders; and because we need to get in front of technologies like artificial intelligence and quantum technology before they get in front of us.
In today’s world, creating an R&D system that is efficient, coherent and strategic is not optional.
It is necessary and it can’t come soon enough, because the more volatile the world becomes, the more we need home-grown R&D.
There is no economic prosperity for Australia without getting the R&D system right.
This opinion piece was first published on 3 December in Examine, a weekly newsletter by science reporter Liam Mannix, owned by the Sydney Morning Herald.
Read the Academy’s media release on the strategic examination of the R&D system
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