In February this year the Minister for Innovation, Industry, Science and Research put forth his vision the future of research and innovation in the university sector. Senator Kim Carr was speaking at the ANU Executive Retreat. The following is an edited version of his speech.

Innovation and research flourish in an environment of freedom, openness, democracy and diversity. That’s what I’m determined to create.

An environment that sustains a variety of research styles and outcomes. An environment in which curiosity-driven research, user-driven research and bespoke problem-solving all have an equal chance to thrive.

ANU is central to what I’m trying to achieve.
Its foundation marked the beginning of a new era in university research.

ANU was critical to the Chifley government’s great nation-building project in the post-war years.

It was and remains a university dedicated to research and public service – not least by providing non-partisan advice to Parliament.

There are many ways research can improve people’s lives. Contributing to our technical and material progress is only one of them.

Research can also reduce inequality, deepen cultural understanding, expand opportunities for the least fortunate, support human rights and promote public health.

It can foster social cohesion, improve the natural environment, increase psychological wellbeing, encourage tolerance and advance democracy.

Research that feeds directly into the work of industry will still be a vitally important part of the more diverse and pluralistic research environment I want to create.
Improving links between researchers and businesses will still be a priority.

But it won’t be the whole story.

We are building a national innovation system that has room for all sorts of research with all sorts of pay-offs, a system that contributes creatively to every dimension of Australian life.

The beauty of the new Department of Innovation, Industry, Science and Research is that it brings responsibility for all aspects of the research function – projects, infrastructure and training – under one roof.

It also sharpens the policy focus on research by disentangling it from general educational concerns.
School, vocational and undergraduate education are vitally important, of course, but that’s precisely the problem – when research is coupled with these responsibilities, it tends to be marginalised.

The new portfolio puts research centre stage.

More than that, by linking it to industry and innovation, we are making it very clear that research – in universities, in public agencies, and in the private sector – is critical to the government’s social and economic vision for Australia.
The deeply flawed Research Quality Framework is gone, but we still need information on what Australia’s universities are doing and how well they are doing it.

A robust quality assurance process is a precondition of institutional autonomy and academic freedom.

Researchers and universities – like governments – must be accountable for how they spend public money. If you want to be in control of your own destiny, you have to be prepared to justify the choices you make. That’s how it works.

We have a finite number of dollars for research, and we must be able to demonstrate that they’re being used to best advantage.

That doesn’t mean I’ll be looking over every vice-chancellor’s shoulder or standing at every researcher’s elbow.

What it means is that quality is king. It means the whole university sector will be expected to measure up against a quality assurance regime which is rigorous, transparent and fair.

This regime will involve both metrics and peer review. It will certainly have a strong international dimension. There is absolutely no point measuring ourselves against each other; we have to measure ourselves against the world.

Because there is no agreement on metrics for the creative arts, humanities and social sciences, we will have to use proxies. And because there are different views on what the proxies should be, we will be consulting with the sector to identify the best model.

People should be aware, however, that we have no time to waste. I want the new QA system bedded down by the end of this year.

It is essential that our universities become more responsive to the needs of the community that sustains them, whether those needs be social or economic.

We will be developing mission-based funding compacts with our public universities. These compacts will be instrumental in bringing about structural reform and cultural change, and in concentrating people’s minds on our international competitiveness.

They will enable us to manage the transition from the present centralised system to a more flexible environment in which each university can respond to the needs of its students, its community, the country and the global knowledge economy by exploiting its comparative advantages – by leading with its strongest suit.

The compacts – covering education, research and research training, community outreach and innovation – will give universities a greater say in priority-setting and establish a platform for future public and private investment.

And there will be future public investment. The inflationary legacy we’ve inherited limits what we can do in the short term, but it is a mistake to assume government funding will continue to decline.

Unlike our predecessors, we are not ideologically opposed to the public production and dissemination of knowledge. We actually believe in it.

A country of our size will never be able to fund every conceivable research interest at every institution. Each university will have concentrations of excellence in particular fields, and we would expect them to give those fields priority.

The idea is that a university with good infrastructure and a critical mass of expertise in a given discipline would become the national hub for that discipline. Extending from each hub would be spokes going out to researchers in other universities and linking them up with colleagues and resources at the centre.

I’m already attracting flack from people who assume that the current crop of research-intensive universities will automatically be the hubs in this model. They won’t.

No university will be a hub. It is departments and research centres within universities that will be hubs. Any institution can become the national focus for a particular discipline if that’s where the best and most important work is being done.

You can’t boost innovation and research without talented people. Australia’s success in attracting its best and brightest into research careers has been mixed.

Between 1983 and 1996, the number of students starting a higher degree by research increased by 9 per cent annually. In the decade from 1997 to 2006, the increase was less than 1 per cent a year.

PhD commencements rose 43 per cent during the ten years to 2006, but this was largely cancelled out by the collapse in Masters by Research commencements, which fell 28 per cent.

The shift from smaller Masters projects to bigger Doctoral projects may mean we are getting more from each candidate, but there is no escaping the fact that the number of students signing up to do higher degrees by research has flatlined.

The net effect is that we’ve been treading water while the rest of the world has powered ahead. A decade of opportunities has been squandered.

Australia has eight PhDs per thousand in the workforce, comparable to Canada but below the United States with eleven, Germany with twenty and Switzerland with twenty-eight (OECD 2007).

That’s why we are boosting research training by doubling the number of Australian Postgraduate Awards.

My objectives for the university sector are no different from my objectives for the rest of the innovation system.

I want to build innovation capacity by concentrating resources to maximise efficiency; by connecting sectors, institutions and individuals to promote collaboration and knowledge transfer; and by increasing investment when fiscal circumstances allow.

I want to forge an environment which inspires creativity and produces innovation outcomes of the highest impact and quality.

ANU will be an integral part of that environment. I look forward to working with you.

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ANU Reporter 
Autumn 2008