A panellist on Australia’s landmark research review has repeated warnings against “cherry-picking” from its recommendations and urged the university sector to pressure the government to accept the whole package.
Kate Cornick said the research, development and innovation “flywheel” – the idea that foundational research builds knowledge, which is translated into businesses, which create wealth, which is reinvested back into foundational research – was not “working effectively” in Australia.
“If we’re forgetting to fund the foundational research that feeds those companies, we’re not going to really kick that flywheel off,” Cornick told a webinar hosted by Universities Australia on 21 May.
Cornick, the newly appointed CEO of the Tech Council of Australia, was a panel member on the Strategic Examination of R&D (Serd). The federal government funded only a handful of its recommendations in the 12 May budget, and only by scrapping a research commercialisation programme.
Cornick said the panel had not expected the government to adopt every recommendation “in one go”, and the budget’s implementation of some of the proposals – particularly the establishment of a National Resilience and Science Council – was a “positive first step. But we absolutely need to keep the pressure on.”
