Formal launch of CRC-ACS

Friday 25 February 2011 saw the formal launch in Melbourne of the Cooperative Research Centre for Advance Composite Structures, which was re-funded from 1 July 2010 to 30 June 2015 in the latest Commonwealth Government CRC Round.

Under revised corporate governance arrangements for the CRC it has a skills based board with two independent directors, of which I am one.

I have placed a full post on CRC-ACS on the AADI Defence Pty Ltd blog – access it here.

Confident, optimistic and forward-looking?

“We are a confident, optimistic and forward-looking people”, Julia Gillard told Kerry O’Brien on the ABC’s 7.30 Report last Monday 26 July.

That is not the way we strike me these days. We have done some confident, optimistic and forward-looking things, but most of them were a long time ago: establishing universities in Sydney and Melbourne in the 1850s, building the Sydney-Melbourne railway line, universal suffrage, female suffrage, the secret ballot, the Flying Doctor Service and more recently the Snowy Mountains Scheme. None of them was ever tested with a focus group.

A contemporary example of a forward-looking project is the National Broadband Network.

But consider the following:

-  Would a confident, optimistic and forward-looking people ever tolerate an election campaign of the irredeemable irrelevance of the one we are enduring at present, with both leaders evading the issues of substance and drowning us in trivia?

- Would a confident, optimistic and forward-looking people get itself into such a state about a tiny trickle of asylum seekers? The prevailing attitude hardly has the heroic ring of Emma Lazarus’s poem at the Statue of Liberty:

 ...”Give me your tired, your poor,

Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,

The wretched refuse of your teeming shore....

Rather, we are the huddled masses, cringing (most of us) on the southeast corner of one of the richest and most sparsely populated countries in the world, waiting with Prime Ministerially understood anxiety for the next boat to appear over the horizon 5,000 km to the northwest.

-  Would a confident, optimistic and forward-looking people require to be reminded constantly by its political leadership that they are “doing it tough” but that the nanny state will ease their “cost of living pressures”? Of course there are people experiencing hardship in every country but these remarks are not addressed to them – we do very little for the genuinely poor, there are not enough votes in it. These remarks are addressed to the employed Australian middle class, the ones with houses, cars, kids and an array of consumer durables.

The notion that the employed Australian middle class is “doing it tough” is just plain laughable. Peer over the wall into the outdoor prison that is Gaza and you will see people who are doing it tough.  Go to a variety of working class neighbourhoods in the big cities of the United States, or visit a camp for Afghan refugees in Pakistan or Iran. Take a look around Calcutta or Bombay, or the slums of Manila.

-  Would a confident, optimistic and forward-looking people be incapable of responding to climate change, even when opinion poll after opinion poll indicates that the public regards it as an important issue that needs to be addressed?

-  Would a confident, optimistic and forward-looking people be as chronically incapable of investing in the nation’s infrastructure as we seem to be?  We snivel and whine about the urban sprawl and about congestion in our major cities, but when forward-looking people proposed construction of high speed rail between Sydney and Melbourne, or even just from Sydney to Canberra in the repechage event, the forces of darkness were hell-bent on killing the idea stone dead.  The French were forward-looking when they began the development of their high speed rail network, an investment that over time has transformed the way the country lives and works. To borrow a phrase from Nike, they just did it, rather than spend 25 years talking about it.

High speed rail could have a similar transformative effect in this country, opening up realistic options for providing for the inevitable growth of the nation’s population, and killing off short-haul aviation like the busy Canberra-Sydney route. 

And did I mention that governments of all complexions have been searching for the site of a second Sydney Airport since the 1940s, and that Mascot was only ever meant to be an interim location for an international airport (see the Parliamentary Library backgrounder here; see also my December 2009 post Déjà vu on second Sydney airport. Ennui too.)? I guess we could say that the governments of the 1940s were forward-looking; they knew that we needed a new Sydney Airport. It’s just that no-one got around to building one.

-  Would a confident, optimistic and forward-looking people sustain over decades one of the lowest national research and development spends in the industrialised world, and ruthlessly suppress curiosity-driven research?  We regard R&D as a regrettable cost. Forward-looking people regard it as an investment. They know that not every research project will produce a patentable widget within the next twelve months, and they know that a proportion of it will not bear fruit at all.  But they know that the modern world was built upon a foundation of research, and much of the most important of it had no clear commercial return in view, just the notion that there are some things we should find out more about.

-  Would a confident, optimistic and forward-looking people achieve less than the OECD average expenditure on education (between the former Soviet republics of Latvia and Lithuania on the 2005 data published in a recent OECD report) and a mediocre performance on tertiary education?

-  Would a confident, optimistic and forward-looking people regard the expectations of its major alliance relationship as being unexaminable, beyond discussion, even as trillion dollar budget deficits and the rise of other military and economic powers indicate that the military role of our ally must decline?

As a society I think we are looking pretty pathetic at the present time. I will begin to think we take ourselves seriously when we start to get serious about investing in education, research and development and transformative infrastructure (not just palliative care like too little too late tollways), and when we start to get serious about our changing strategic environment.

And we should remember that cannot expect others to take us more seriously than we take ourselves.

About Australia 21

One of my key extra-curricular activities is my role as a foundation director of Australia 21.

Australia 21 is an independent, non-partisan, non-profit organisation which was established in 2000 to develop and promote new frameworks of understanding regarding the complex problems which Australian society faces in the 21st century.

It was established in the belief that the big issues that now confront Australians are so complex as to require independent, non-ideological, collaborative inputs from our best thinkers and researchers from many intellectual disciplines around the nation.

Australia 21’s charter commits it to:

-  Promote interdisciplinary and inter-institutional discussion and germinate new research on topics pertinent to our national and regional future

-  Build open networks between researchers, community, corporate, business leaders, policy makers and decision makers

-  Ensure that we are open and accessible to the policy and decision makers who will shape our nation’s future.

Australia 21 operates by drawing on outstanding researchers and experts from diverse institutions and disciplines, nationally and internationally, and from various sectors of society – the research community, government and business. We bring together in roundtables and ongoing research networks of the best minds available and provide them with opportunities to interact in ways that are not usually available.

Whereas most of our national research institutions very sensibly contour their research efforts around established research teams, our tendency is to start by identifying a crucial question and then go looking for the multidisciplinary, inter-institutional  team that can answer it. We do not claim that this is a superior approach, simply that the nation needs both approaches.

We undertake inclusive, integrated analysis in four thematic programs:

-  Australians in society (how we develop and interact with each other)

-  Australians in the landscape (how we interact with our natural environment and the landscape over which we exercise custodianship)

-  Australia in the world (how we interact with the rest of the community of nations)

- Building Australia’s resilience (building our capacity to withstand shocks and adverse events).

We see all present and future Australians as our stakeholders. We serve them by working to enhance the links between science, business and policy, through our focus on complex long-term issues. We produce distinctive outputs of relevance to governments, corporations, universities and communities.

Australia 21 is registered by the Commonwealth Department of Education, Employment and Workplace Relations as an approved research organisation, and is gift tax exempt.

Our independence is assured by the fact that we are entirely dependent upon donations, grants and in-kind assistance.  If you wish to support our work, please visit our website www.australia21.org.au, where you can make a secure on-line donation.

Defence Materials Technology Centre

The Defence Materials Technology Centre (DMTC) was established in June 2008 following the Commonwealth Government’s decision to establish technology development joint ventures, Defence Future Capability Technology Centres (DFCTCs), to combine expertise and resources from defence industries and research providers.

Launched in February 2009, DMTC is Australia’s first DFCTC and focuses on developing and delivering superior technologies to Australia’s defence industry.

Its purpose is to develop and deliver advanced materials technologies and manufacturing processes across four program areas – Aircraft Platforms, Maritime Platforms, Armour Applications and Propulsion Systems.

Projects within these programs will deliver new materials technologies that will increase strength, payload capacity and operating range while improving performance and durability in Australia’s defence industry. New manufacturing processes will increase efficiency in production, reduce costs and waste, customise equipment for specific Australian conditions and provide access to new markets.

The business structure of DMTC is modelled on the successful Cooperative Research Centre (CRC) program. Its core and supporting partners from defence industries, universities and research agencies are already experienced in providing a wide range of industrial and technological disciplines within the supply chain that supports Australia’s defence industry capability.

Partners provide DMTC with access to their skilled personnel, materials and manufacturing facilities and work with the company to ensure that all research is focused on delivering to the end-user – the Australian Defence Force.

DMTC operational funding is drawn from several sources with an initial underwriting in excess of $85 million in cash and in-kind contributions. The Commonwealth contributed $30 million with the State Governments of Victoria, Queensland and New South Wales putting in a combined $9 million. Collaborative partners are responsible for providing the remaining resources.

DMTC operates as a private company, and is funded for an initial seven-year term. Its Chief Executive Officer is Dr Mark Hodge, a professional engineer who prior to his recruitment in June 2008 had been for three years the CEO of Australian Aerospace and Defence Innovations (AADI).

Reducing rural industry research

It is sad to read the report in the 7 May 2009 Australian Financial Review (p. 8) that Land and Water Australia (LWA) is to be abolished and the Rural Industries Research and Development Corporation (RIRDC) is to have its budget reduced from $13 million to $10 million (i.e., a 23% reduction).

Land and Water Australia began life in 1990 as the Land and Water Resources Research and Development Corporation, an R&D Corporation established by the Hawke Government under the Primary Industries and Energy Research & Development (PIERD) Act 1989.

It acts as a research investor and research broker developing, in collaboration with industry, government and local communities, research programs directed to the development of the knowledge required for sustainable management and use of Australia’s natural resources. In 2007-08 it delivered a $38.7 million R&D program, leveraging its $13 million budget appropriation to $38.9 million through its collaboration with other government agencies and industry. Given that we have custodianship of a land mass of about 7.5 million sq. km., with great geographical, climatic and biological diversity, $13 million p.a. of Government expenditure does not strike me as excessive, even in the toughest of times.

I have been through one of these R&D corporation executions. It was my sad duty as Secretary, Department of Primary Industries and Energy in 1996 to preside over the wind up of the Energy Research & Development Corporation. It is never an elegant procedure – simply a matter of shutting everything down, paying all the bills, switching off the lights and sending everyone home, no matter how important, high quality or close to completion any given program might be.

No doubt there will be some fine words at budget time about how LWA has done a great job but its job is done, the baton will be picked up by the Caring for our Country Program, or CSIRO, or someone. Don’t believe a word of it, it never works that way. R&D is a delicate flower. It is not possible to break up research teams and shut down programs and have everything continue as though nothing has happened. And as this is about saving money, there is by definition a clear intention to reduce expenditure on the function.

The Rural Industries Research and Development Corporation (RIRDC) was established under the same legislation as LWA. It is an interesting and important body because it is the home for funding R&D projects which cut across rural industry in general and thus cannot readily obtain funding from any of the sector-specific R&D bodies, and for R&D relating to new and emerging rural industries. I find it hard to explain why its budget is as small as it is, let alone why anyone would want to cut it.

Reductions of this kind at the present time raise a larger question about the Government’s response to the Global Financial Crisis. The Government has, for understandable reasons, spent tens of billions of dollars attempting to stimulate consumer spending and the housing industry, in the interest of sustaining employment levels. That is all very well and good, but given that just about every consumer product is manufactured overseas, it is a mystery why the Government chooses to stimulate consumer spending to the point where it feels it is necessary to bring about the abolition of the jobs of people who are currently employed in contributing to the business of government, such as people working on rural R&D programs, people collecting essential data for the Bureau of Statistics, or self-employed contractors working for government agencies.