Govt has lost its way on R&D
health, transport and welfare — because we can’t afford those aspirations and we don’t invest enough in research, science and technology to turn our productivity around.
The data is actually worse than typically presented, ratioed to GDP. Because we have a low GDP per capita it means research investment per capita is not a third that of Denmark but more like a seventh.
Sadly, though the data is well-known, research leaders and agencies tend to avoid protesting because the received wisdom is that rocking the funding boat is counter-productive.
From a brilliant start, the Government then took the tempting detour of restructuring and promptly lost the vision.
Science is now buried somewhere in the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment (MBIE) and along with it the vision and the focus.
With Industrial Research Ltd morphing into Callaghan Innovation we no longer have a crown research institute focusing on research for the manufacturing sector — the sector most likely to be able to deliver significant productivity gains.
Its research arm was decimated and now it is largely just a funding body where other such agencies already existed. Callaghan Innovation seems to have been at sea since its inception and the only significant changes it seems to have made are its staff — on an all too regular basis.
Governments have been running down the wider crown research institutes sector for the past 20 years. Research investment in that sector has declined over that period, as has the number of researchers.
This is a profound change in the science system, clearly someone’s predetermined strategy, but it seems to have occurred unscrutinised and without evidence-based justification.
Possibly the biggest failing was to scrap the research and development (R&D) tax credit. With the global financial crisis biting hard in 2009, tax credits were seen as unnecessary budgetary expenditure.
But research is an investment, not a cost, and concerns about abuses could easily have been met by suitable checks.
One that I proposed was to require R&D claims above a certain threshold to be vetted by the relevant crown research institute, thus not only keeping companies honest but giving immediate interaction between CRIs and all research-leaning businesses across the nation, surely opening opportunities for seeding, refining and resourcing new ideas.
We need to get away from immigrationfuelled growth (with all its problems) to innovation-fuelled growth. Research, science and technology needs to come back out of MBIE if the original vision and focus is to be regained.
But the lesson surely is to avoid restructuring. Achieve what is needed through existing agencies by setting the right mission, appointing the right people, and imposing the right accountabilities.
And it is inescapable, the Government needs to invest here much more heavily. We need to fund strategies, not projects.
Where is the follow-up on all the new ideas that have been funded over the years? New ideas come easily. But is there a market, what is the path to the market and what were the outcomes?
Surely it is better to support research teams that have a strategy of alignment with industry or are actively creating new industries.
The minister responsible for research, science and technology has a huge challenge ahead — one no previous minister has adequately addressed.
It easy to be distracted by exciting discoveries made by our researchers, to drift dreamily into a show-and-tell role and to dispense awards from time to time.
We need a comprehensive wellresourced science system with each agency having clear roles and a welldefined mission, and the Government needs to reaffirm all parts of the system, crown research institutes included.
But more importantly, we need a seachange in the culture of our researchaverse industries and it will require determined and wise action from the top down. There is work to be done.