Securing Australia's Future: Harnessing Interdisciplinary Research for Innovation and Prosperity

SECURING AUSTRALIA’S

FUTURE

Harnessing Interdisciplinary Research for Innovation and Prosperity

SECURING

AUSTRALIA’S

FUTURE

Simon Torok and Paul Holper

© Australian Council of Learned Academies Secretariat Ltd 2017

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National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry

Torok, Simon, author.

Securing Australia’s future : harnessing interdisciplinary

research for innovation and prosperity / Simon Torok and Paul Holper.

9781486306695 (paperback)

9781486306701 (epdf)

9781486306718 (epub)

Includes index.

Economic development – Australia.

Economic development – Effect of education on – Australia

Technological innovations – Economic aspects – Australia.

Globalization – 21st century.

Australia – Economic conditions – 21st century.

Holper, Paul N., 1957– author.

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Front cover: Night-time view of dishes that are part of the Australian Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder (ASKAP) – a next-generation radio telescope in remote Western Australia (with modifications) (Credit: Alex Cherney/CSIRO); Blurred walking people (Credit: bim/iStockPhoto) Back cover: Stars at Uluru, NT (Credit: Ed Dunens/Flickr, CC BY 2.0)

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Contents

Prologue

Preface: The SAF Program – rethinking science advice to government

Introduction

An evidence-based approach to informing policy

Securing Australia’s future

Golden threads

Interdisciplinary research topics

The Australian Council of Learned Academies (ACOLA)

1Australia’s strengths – and a plan for a secure future

Introduction

Addressing the fundamentals

Policy directions

Opportunities for sectors of the economy

An innovative workforce

Protecting our environment

Conclusion

2Engagement with Asia: time to be smarter

Introduction

Smart engagement: identifying the opportunities

Tapping into the market while avoiding the risks

Teaming with our neighbours

Better business

Conclusion

3Boosting productivity with innovation and new technologies

Introduction

Investing in ourselves

Transforming research into value

Innovation requires skilled labour and collaboration across disciplines

Tinkering, failing and adapting: working with new technology

Conclusion

4Recharging education to power the nation

Introduction

Achieving an innovative, flexible and creative workforce

Science, technology, engineering and mathematics education: a national report card

Encouraging and improving STEM teaching

Too few women in STEM

Lifting Indigenous engagement in STEM

Partnering and enriching

National STEM coordination

Lessons for Australia and STEM

Findings for the future

Engaging with the world

Conclusion

5Green and clean: securing a sustainable future

Introduction

Environment and energy

Cities and mobility

Collaborative research for sustainability

Preparing for the future

Conclusion

6Conclusion: challenges and opportunities for Australia

Advice for an unknowable future

Past performance ≠ future success

Smart farming, smart engagement

Educating the future workforce

Exporting knowledge

Securing Australia’s environment

Taking it home: key messages

Segue: Securing Australia’s Future compendium

Appendix 1. Australia’s Comparative Advantage

Appendix 2. STEM: Country Comparisons: International Comparisons of Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) Education

Appendix 3. Smart Engagement with Asia: Leveraging Language, Research and Culture

Appendix 4. The Role of Science, Research and Technology in Lifting Australian Productivity

Appendix 5. Technology and Australia’s Future: New Technologies and their Role in Australia’s Security, Cultural, Democratic, Social and Economic Systems

Appendix 6. Engineering Energy: Unconventional Gas Production

Appendix 7. Australia’s Agricultural Future

Appendix 8. Delivering Sustainable Urban Mobility

Appendix 9. Translating Research for Economic and Social Benefit: Country Comparisons

Appendix 10. Skills and Capabilities for Australian Enterprise Innovation

Appendix 11. Australia’s Diaspora Advantage: Realising the Potential for Building Transnational Business Networks with Asia

Index

The members of the Council and Board of the Australian Council of Learned Academies (ACOLA) commend this publication and express their deep thanks to all who have contributed to its success, particularly the Australian Research Council who funded the Securing Australia’s Future program, the Project Steering Committee (with special thanks to Peter McPhee for his oversight of the production of this book), the Expert Working Groups and the ACOLA Secretariat.

ACOLA Council

Professor Andrew Holmes, Chair of ACOLA (2016) and President of the Australian Academy of Science

Professor John Fitzgerald, President of the Australian Academy of the Humanities

Professor Glenn Withers, President of the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia

Professor Peter Gray, President of the Australian Academy of Technology and Engineering

ACOLA Board

Mr Ben Patterson, Acting Chief Executive of the Australian Academy of Science

Dr Christina Parolin, Executive Director of the Australian Academy of the Humanities

Dr John Beaton, Executive Director of the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia

Dr Margaret Hartley, Chief Executive Officer and Director of the Australian Academy of Technology and Engineering

Dr Angus Henderson, General Manager of the Australian Council of Learned Academies

Prologue

Professor Ian Chubb AC FTSE

Chief Scientist for Australia (2011–15)

In 2011, when I started as Chief Scientist for Australia, there was a view around that we (or I) could spend a lot of time developing great reports with their climax so far in the future that the government of the moment would have little capacity (or interest) in taking them anywhere. So I had a problem: how would we seek to influence the here and now, and identify the matters that Ministers needed to know about along with the actions that they could take, without losing sight of the need to think ahead of the game?

The downside risk was obvious: a focus on the now means that the matters further ahead in time could drift even further into the future. A cursory knowledge of our history shows us that the exigencies of the moment nearly always trump discussion of the actions which should be taken to improve the mid- to long-term view.

To me it was clear: we would have to make a particular effort to shift and sustain the conversation or lose sight of the horizon because of a myopic view of the world.

So the Office of the Chief Scientist with help from the Australian Research Council sought out the Australian Council of Learned Academies (ACOLA) – the group established by the four Australian academies to enable intelligent people to work together away from the exigencies of their disciplines, territory, narrow interests or academic envy.

We effectively set up a novel experiment in Australian public policy: draw all the academic disciplines in to produce evidence that would put the interests of the future securely on the national radar. It reflected a belief that the future can and should be discussed in informed – dare we say ‘learned’ and cross-disciplinary – terms.

HG Wells once observed that there were many professors of history, but few or no professors of the future. That probably remains the case in much of the academic world. In the media, on the other hand, the ratio seems to be reversed: any number of pundits will speculate about what the future might hold, or promise the renaissance of some never-defined Golden Age – too often mouths masquerading as brains.

That is not a surprise. It is much easier to make things up than to look them up. It is also fairly safe because the conversation moves on, and we forget.

So when we started we knew that Australia, too, has no shortage of pontificators-at-large. What we sought to develop through this project was different: a deep tradition of scholarly future-thinking, combining the merits of expert peer review and rigorous analysis with a mission to shape change.

This meant the challenge was twofold. One, to encourage researchers to venture boldly into the difficult business of combining their expertise to tease out the implications for the future. And two, to find a way to give national decision makers access to genuine expertise in a helpful and timely form.

Front of mind was the example of the National Research Council of the United States. As the research arm of three of the US academies, the Council has the mission:

To improve government decision making and public policy, increase public understanding, and promote the acquisition and dissemination of knowledge in matters involving science, engineering, technology, and health. Our independent, expert reports and other scientific activities inform policies and actions that have the power to improve the lives of people in the USA and around the world.

– The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine website

Good enough for them … and surely (with a broader focus, and the appropriate geographical tweak) good enough for us. To improve government decision making, public understanding, acquisition and dissemination of knowledge, and so forth, is the stuff that dreams are made of.

We have the passion, talent and ability in Australia. But it has rarely (or never?) been harnessed to focus the disciplines so squarely on particular topics especially important to future national wellbeing. What will Australia be like? What do we want it to be? What do we have to do to prepare the foundations for that future – to take the long run, to be ready? How do we eschew the ‘techo-talk’ that turns too many in the community off, even though they pay for most of the expertise that generates it? And all this in the context that this generation has, surely, a moral obligation to prepare comprehensively and as best it can the ground for the next.

I would not be the first to see in Australia’s political institutions a tendency to drift. It is captured by our national motto ‘she’ll be right’, or its sibling ‘no worries’. Perhaps our history has led us to believe that something will always crop up to replace the last bit of good luck we’ve exhausted, without our taking the trouble to build something with enduring strength in its place.

In any event, the rewards for building those assets are difficult to fit within the three years that governments have (at least nominally) to leave their mark. And marks are important to our professional polity.

But to be better than that, we have to work at it. And it can be complicated.

Since the Securing Australia’s Future (SAF) program commenced, we have had four Prime Ministers and seven Ministers responsible for science. All have had instincts, interests, impulses and imaginations – overlapping maybe, but different.

That is the context in which 11 reports and one SAF review report were born.

The point of the exercise was to create a mechanism that would endure, no matter the personalities or politics involved. That is the test we had to meet.

Did we succeed?

As always, the answer depends on where the expectation is set. Every report put forward evidence and useful and useable insights. These were orchestrated into recommendations to government by the Office of the Chief Scientist and the experts. Their quality is testament to the calibre of the teams involved.

On the other hand, not every report received the coverage or policy impact it deserves. So perhaps the better question to ask is under what circumstances the individual projects fared best.

I think, for example, of SAF02 STEM: Country Comparisons, a report routinely cited in the many think-tank papers and policy submissions that followed in its wake.

That study made it abundantly clear that science, technology, engineering, mathematics (STEM) education is, in the authors’ words, the ‘overwhelming preoccupation’ of national governments nearly everywhere (but not here at that time). It set out models for our own education system to follow, as well as an imperative to raise the bar.

SAF02 was well targeted, well timed and well supported long after the initial report launch. We kept talking about it – and so it kept being talked about in the places where its insights were required.

Of course, SAF02 is not alone in presenting ideas or changing readers’ perspectives. The challenge that remains is to capitalise on the insights to be drawn from all 11 reports.

My three word mantra is passion, persistence and patience. It is not enough to be authors of reports, even good ones. We have to be passionate ambassadors for their findings long after the ink has dried. Patient and persistent. Relentless.

The future is a long game, after all, but its base must be built now. What we will need is not simply waiting on a shelf in some cupboard somewhere for a future Prime Minister to take it down, dust it off and use it. It is a national vision handed on through time; with every new Prime Minister picking up its threads, because Australians understand its importance and insist that they do.

In concluding, let me acknowledge the many people who have contributed to the SAF series over the years and pushed the project in new directions. The million words we have on the page mark the diversity, as well as the dedication, of the individuals and organisations involved.

The SAF project was a good beginning which has left us with an understanding of how best to choose our means. The end remains: securing a better Australia. We will always go further, and faster, with the guidance that evidence provides, combined with respect for expertise.

Preface: The SAF Program – rethinking science advice to government

Emeritus Professor Michael N Barber FAA, FTSE, FAICD

Chair, Program Steering Committee (Jan 2013–June 2016)

Securing Australia’s Future program

Australian Council of Learned Academies

In an age dominated by science and technology it is ironic that science and research are not taken as seriously as they should be in the formulation of public policy. From climate change and genetically modified crops to debates on the safety of nanotechnology and vaccination, scientific facts often get lost. Part of the problem lies with those offering science advice failing to appreciate, as Sir Peter Gluckman, the Chief Scientist for New Zealand, has emphasised, that science advice is only one stream of advice that public policy makers receive.

The vision of the Securing Australia’s Future (SAF) program was to encourage more compelling science and research advice, enriched through an interdisciplinary way of generating evidence-based findings (importantly, not recommendations) that were based upon contemporary and high-quality research and conveyed with a greater awareness of the cultural, economic and social and even political contexts in which any ensuing policy would be developed.

To do so, the then Chief Scientist for Australia, Professor Ian Chubb, decided to draw upon the collective wisdom of Australia’s four learned academies operating as the Australian Council of Learned Academies (ACOLA). With the support of the Australian Research Council, SAF was conceived.

The entire program of 11 reports was overseen by a project steering committee (PSC) that ACOLA convened. The PSC was a remarkable group of individuals that I had, for all but the first six months of the program, the privilege and honour to chair. At any time the PSC consisted of three Fellows from each of the four academies. Over the four years of SAF, 22 Fellows served on the PSC. As Fellows we came to the PSC with recognition of distinction in our disciplinary specialities: from mathematics to history, economics to biology, engineering to geography. However, over the program we all increasingly relished the views that came from very different perspectives. As Peter McPhee, a historian, once said: ‘the camaraderie, sense of purpose and willingness to step out of our own comfort zones often made the PSC meetings exhilarating’.

Scott Page of the University of Michigan has written a book, The Difference: How the Power of Diversity Creates Better Groups, Firms, Schools and Societies, on the importance of diversity in public policy, particularly in tackling so-called wicked problems for which interventions can have (and usually do have) unintended consequences. By diversity Page does not only mean gender diversity, as important as that is. Rather he refers to the value that different perspectives of experts from different backgrounds, experience, discipline and so on can have on the development of effective public policy and associated interventions. However, to realise this value, Page argues, the experts must be willing to step outside their comfort zones and recognise that no particular perspective is any more valuable than any other. I believe that the PSC, and to a large extent the SAF program itself, was a confirmation (and indeed an exemplar) of Page’s thesis.

What did the PSC do? Initially it was conceived as a steering and oversight committee charged with recommending the membership of the Expert Working Groups (EWGs), high-level oversight of their work and quality assurance. Over the duration of the program the PSC evolved in response to various issues that arose. In particular it took a greater direct involvement – through periodic ‘deep dives’ and the assignment of specific PSC members to liaise with the EWGs – in the workings of the EWGs to ensure that the breadth of the academies’ expertise was brought to bear and timely reports were delivered with clear findings that could be actioned by the Office of the Chief Scientist and/or line government departments.

The 11 reports developed through the SAF program, and this volume which synthesises them, are the important legacy of the work undertaken through the SAF program. The individual reports, while summarised in the appendices of this volume, can be accessed on the ACOLA website (www.acola.org.au). The ACOLA website also archives the working papers and consultant reports commissioned by the EWGs. These, by themselves, constitute a significant legacy of the program that can assist future research.

A less formal but nonetheless very important legacy of the SAF program is the lessons PSC and ACOLA learned from delivering the program itself. SAF was a novel experiment and had to test and learn as it progressed. The learnings form a valuable asset for ACOLA which should continue to contribute to the development of any future opportunities for SAF-style programs that contribute to national interests.

So what did we learn? The most significant conclusion from the past four years is that the SAF program demonstrated that the four academies, working collectively and collaboratively as ACOLA, can be an important voice in evidence-based policy advice in Australia. Eleven reports of substance, drawing value and insights from both the science, technology, engineering, mathematics (STEM) and humanities, arts and social sciences (HASS) disciplines, were produced on topics of importance to Australia’s future. The quality and depth of these reports should see their relevance maintained for some time. In process terms, we learnt a great deal about the management and leadership skills necessary to produce effective, productive research across the disciplines. Such skills paid rich rewards in outcomes and are recorded in the PSC review of the program available on the ACOLA website.

Since the overall aim of the SAF program was to influence the formulation of public policy, how successful was it in achieving this objective? By design many of the projects coincided with important issues of public policy and they do seem to have had an influence. Prime examples include:

•SAF01: substantive input to the development of the Productivity Commission Report, Migrant Intake into Australia (2016);

•SAF02: substantive input to the development of the Chief Scientist’s position paper Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics in the National Interest: A Strategic Approach (2013) and the Vision for a Science Nation Consultation Paper (2015);

•SAF03: influence on the development of the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade’s Public Diplomacy Strategy 2014–2016 (2014);

•SAF04: substantive input to the development of Boosting the Commercial Returns from Research (2015) and the Industry Innovation and Competitiveness Agenda (2014);

•SAF06: substantive input to the development of shale gas policies at federal and state/territory level (2014);

•SAF07: coincided with the release of the Government’s Agricultural Competiveness White Paper (2015);

•SAF08: references in the Australian Infrastructure Plan: Priorities and reforms for our nation’s future (2016); and

•SAF09: findings incorporated in the National Innovation and Science Agenda (2015), the Watt Review of Research Policy and Funding Arrangements (2015).

Ideally this book will carry the SAF findings even more widely.

What else could have been done with SAF? The 11 SAF reports all deal with issues of public policy important to Australia’s future. There are, of course, many other issues that will affect and determine Australia’s future, a number of which could benefit from the multidisciplinary perspective brought to the SAF program.

As Simon Torok and Paul Holper, the authors of this book, note:

The scope of the SAF project was limited by the commission agreed between the government of the day and the Office of the Chief Scientist. There was no suggestion that the project would examine every major challenge facing Australia: so, for example, there was no specific report that examined the implications of Australia’s demographic changes, such as in life expectancy, and their implications for health policy. Nor was there a report devoted to climate change, although the imperatives of environmental sustainability underpin many of the reports and this book.

Two of my favourite projects that the PSC tried to get up but failed to for various reasons were tentatively called ‘Reengineering Health’ and ‘Privacy in the Age of Security’. The former would have explored how technology and other disciplines from engineering and operations technology to economics, industrial relations, psychology and design theory might transform health, thereby decreasing cost and increasing patient outcomes. The latter could have explored the tensions and compromises involved in striking an appropriate balance between privacy and the need for security particularly given technological developments, and could have asked questions such as: has the notion of privacy changed in the age of Facebook?

While those of us close to the SAF program and particularly on the PSC could, by the end, see topics that SAF could have explored and even how we might have improved the ones we did, SAF has left a lasting legacy. And indeed, in doing so, it broke new ground.

A fundamental tenet … is the interdisciplinary nature of the enterprise. The ability to mobilize first-rate expertise across the science, engineering, social science and humanities communities is quite extraordinary. Indeed, there is no comparable effort outside Australia that has been able to sustain such an integrated structure beyond a one-off study … In that sense, the work of the SAF is not only a unique asset in Australia; it is also a model that academies abroad should watch closely to see whether it can be institutionalized.

– Richard Bissell, Executive Director, Policy & Global Affairs, of the US National Academies in Washington

This book by Simon Torok and Paul Holper is thus not just a synthesis of the reports but also a tribute to all who made SAF what it