Australia's Chief Scientist, Dr Cathy Foley, delivered the Ralph Slatyer Address on Science and Society in Sydney on 25 November. 

I want to acknowledge the traditional owners, the Ngunnawal people, and pay my respects to them and to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples in the audience today.

One of the things I’m pleased to have been a part of as Australia’s Chief Scientist is the recognition of Indigenous knowledge systems as a valuable part of the broader science and research system, with 65,000 years of understanding to offer.

I’ll say a little bit more about that in a minute.

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I also want to pay tribute to Ralph Slatyer.

I understand his life partner June and son Tony are in the audience. Ralph Slatyer also had two daughters, Beth, who is unable to be here, and Judy – and I spoke with Judy last week as I prepared for today.

Judy reminded me that before he became Chief Scientist, Ralph was ambassador to UNESCO – where he not only developed a tremendous understanding of how to navigate difficult issues, but was able to learn from approaches to innovation in different countries. 

He became Australia’s Chief Scientist when Bob Hawke was promoting the “clever country”. Australia was weak on commercialisation, but had great science and research, and for Ralph, the key was collaboration. Coming together around critical ideas that had the potential to shape the future.

He was proud of his work to raise the profile of science with government, and of his own research that was foundational and often cited work in understanding plant-soil relationships.

But far and away, the thing he was most proud of was establishing the Cooperative Research Centres. 

The CRC program really is an extraordinary legacy – and remains an important part of our innovation system 30 years later. Tanya Monro talked about the importance of the photonics CRC to her career when she delivered this address, and I think many of us in science have a CRC story. Mine was the AMET  CRC for mineral exploration technologies in the 1990s.

One of the things that struck me while I was speaking with Judy, was the way she described of her father as completely solutions focused always looking to work with and include others to solve issues in the interest of our country. And if he ran into a problem, the question he asked was: ‘how do we focus on this and solve it?’

I completely relate to this. I have tended to see the challenges and problems I’ve dealt with in my science career and in this job in the same way – if it’s not prevented by the laws of physics, it’s solvable.

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As you probably know, I finish my term in a couple of weeks – so this is my last major speech in Canberra, and a chance for me to reflect on the past 4 years. 

It’s fitting to be back here at the National Press Club. I spoke here in my first major speech in the role – in April 2021. It was televised and the media were sitting front and centre – so it’s safe to say I was a little more nervous then, than I am today. Thank you for your warm welcome!

As I end my term, I return … let’s say strengthened … by 4 years at the pointy end, where science meets Government.

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I have learned … so much … I want to be frank as I share some of that today.

But before I do, I’m going to give away the punchline, because while I intend to be upfront about what I think needs to change, my conclusion will not be that the system is broken.

My conclusion will reflect my inbuilt optimism about Australia’s future as an innovation nation – an optimism strengthened by the goodwill, energy and shared ambition that I have encountered everywhere I’ve gone during my term. But first …

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When I spoke here in 2021, I talked about the Olympic relay where the Japanese team surprised the world to win silver by focusing in intense detail on the baton transfer – working out how to pass the baton between runners with maximum efficiency and avoid losing precious micro-seconds in the handover.

I liked this analogy because I’m a runner. I also liked it because it’s how I have always gone about my work. 

If something’s not working as hoped, I tend to undo the pieces and drill down to the detail. Lay it all out on the work bench and think about how to fit them together for maximum impact. 

It won’t surprise you to hear that when I was a child my room was full of bits of hairdryers and crystal radios – taken apart, and maybe not always put back together the right way. 

It’s amazing I’ve still got all my fingers and toes when I look back at what I got up to with my dad’s toolbox. 

I loved this process of investigating how things work.

And that’s what I’ve aimed to do as Chief Scientist, take a close look at some of those foundational pieces of the system to see whether things can be done differently with better effectiveness and impact.

Metrics

One of those pieces is how best to measure success in the research sector – and I’m looking forward to releasing a report on this topic soon. 

At the moment, the measures of success are skewing outcomes. The focus on numbers of papers and citations incentivises the wrong kinds of behaviour – first-author status, publish or perish, internal competition rather than cooperation. 

And this makes it harder for younger researchers or people from different backgrounds to get their feet on the ground. It’s harder than it should be for new ideas and experimental approaches to get support. There’s not sufficient recognition of time spent outside universities, for example, in industry.

I believe new ways of measuring success in research careers will help rebalance the system in ways that free up researchers to focus on what matters – following the evidence where it leads and testing a new idea, curiosity, collegiality, and flexible career pathways that don’t disadvantage people for time in industry, or government, or time out to look after children. 

Open access

I’ve also been working on improving access to research literature – my advice to the Australian Government was released in August. 

And before I finish up, I will hand further advice on possible implementation approaches to the Government’s Strategic Examination of Research and Development – which is looking at how to incentivise greater spending on R&D in the business sector. 

This is the culmination of 4 years’ work for me. I have kept plugging away at it – because I believe open access to the research literature would deliver real benefits to Australia. 

You probably don’t need me to explain why, when you consider that many of the people who need to know what the latest science and research says – including people investing in emerging technologies, but also teachers and students, health professionals, citizen scientists, public servants, and many others, don’t have access without paying. 

The science is locked behind paywalls and university subscriptions. 

I want to see easier, universal access, which will increase productivity and create competition. It will accelerate the process by which discovery makes its way into innovations that will change the way we live our lives and solve our greatest challenges.

The shift to open access is unstoppable – and even as my term as Chief Scientist ends, I’ll continue taking a keen interest.

Research infrastructure

Research infrastructure is another piece of the puzzle. The term “research infrastructure” covers a huge range of equipment used for science and research – but I’m thinking here about the pieces of very complex kit that require foresight, planning and a lot of money.

One example getting attention at the moment is the question of how to provide sufficient data centres – and the energy to run them – to meet the surge in demand from AI and high-performance computing. 

This is a challenge that will start to bite in just a couple of years, impacting our ability to make the most of what AI has to offer.  

Quantum computing is another example. And there are examples in research translation infrastructure for med-tech, clean-energy technologies, or areas like semiconductor manufacturing. Not to mention infrastructure for fundamental science projects such as astronomy. The infrastructure is expensive and complex. 

These are just a few examples, but they give you a flavour of the future thinking that is needed to ensure we’re preparing for technologies that are coming over the horizon – and we have the kit and the capability we need. This is a fast-changing space.

The National Science and Technology Council has initiated a project to look at these questions, and it will be for the next Chief Scientist to consider with the council.

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander knowledge systems 

A fourth focus for me has been the recognition of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander knowledge systems.

We’re making real strides here – the ASTE Traditional Knowledge Innovation Award is going in its third year. It highlights the depth that Indigenous knowledge brings to the table for a better understanding of our continent and its rich biodiversity to name one aspect. The Prime Minister’s Prizes for Science will add an Indigenous category next year.

And I’m very pleased that the National Science and Technology Council is going to play a part in implementing the new science priority concerning Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander knowledge systems – with the help of Professor Reuben Bolt, the first Indigenous member of the council.

I describe this as a foundational piece of Australia’s science and research system because it is just that. 

With the generosity of Indigenous peoples and an approach that is Indigenous led, there is a trove of information that represents a comparative advantage for Australia and can help drive new innovation.

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These are just a few of the things I’ve been working on, but they’re only part of the puzzle.
When you take the innovation ecosystem apart to look at the pieces closely, you find other things that are not working as well as they should be.
 

• We do not have enough investment in research and development (and as I said earlier, there is now a taskforce with a mission to turn this around).
• We do not invest enough in fundamental science, and PhD scholarships are still below the minimum wage.
• We do not have a nationally coordinated way to support all research infrastructure and international research engagement.
• We do not have porous enough connections between different parts of the system, research, industry and government.
• We lack patience; we are too quick to abandon programs without giving them time to work.
• We do not have sufficient tolerance for risk, and we do not easily embrace new ideas. We’re too quick to criticise, and too often retreat to the safe corner to admire the problem, instead of taking courage in hand to try something new.

That’s quite a list!

Today, I want to focus on those last two sets of issues – how to create the time and space to let things work; and how to develop an ecosystem that embraces new ways of doing things so that we become a country, not just of great discovery science, but of great experimentation and innovation.

There’s an obvious tension in those 2 ideas – patience on the one hand and experimentation on the other – but they’re both essential parts of the system and it’s important to get the balance right. 

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First, to my contention that we are too quick to chop and change.

For those of us in the science and research sector, patience is almost inbuilt. We’re used to a very long runway – because it takes decades, sometimes much longer, for discoveries to work their way into new capabilities. 

Right now, the world is on the cusp of incredible new technologies based on quantum science. But you can trace this back more than 200 years to the moment that light was discovered to be both a particle and a wave. 

This discovery at the heart of quantum physics has given rise to pretty much everything in my working life. 

Gravitational waves – ripples in the very fabric of the universe – were detected just a few years ago, in 2015. But that measurement was the culmination of an effort that began 100 years ago when Einstein first predicted their existence. 

In an example from my own research, I did some of the seminal work on new nitride semiconductors in the early 1980s. Fifteen years later, that led to the invention of white-light LEDs in Japan. 

So as scientists, we have deep memories – and we know that it’s good to stay the course. 

No-one can ever be quite sure what will come from the scientific endeavour. 

It’s unpredictable, full of twists and turns, sometimes dead ends, and sometimes sudden advances, and always long in the tooth when you look closely. 

But we know that something will bubble up given enough time and effort. And yet our history of programs aimed at shifting the dial on complexity, innovation, and entrepreneurialism in the Australia is a history of impatience. 

There are notable exceptions – and the CRC program is one of them. But too often, initiatives are abandoned too quickly.

Let me give you an example.

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Some of you may remember the GIRD scheme in the 1980s. GIRD stands for Grants for Industry Research and Development. 

This was a scheme designed to boost industry spend on R&D – oh how we dance in circles! – and it offered non-dilutive funds to take a recent breakthrough to industry application faster.

My work at the CSIRO in high-temperature superconductivity was funded by those grants. 

We worked with three companies – on biomedical applications with Nucleus, new electronics with AWA, and steelmaking with BHP. 

We managed to create a superconducting device, the SQUID, that could detect holes of 1 cm or greater in steel. Which when you think about it is ridiculous. If you’ve got a 1 cm hole, you don’t need a quantum device to see it! 

But BHP was interested in using the technology for minerals exploration rather than detecting defects in steel – and that’s the direction we went, eventually developing the LandTEM used for detection of deeply buried ore bodies under cover.

That’s the innovation process: an interesting idea that gets more interesting, as the science develops; consideration of where the science might have application in the real world; putting out the feelers to test who might want to fund it and where it might be commercially useful; and then the long process of getting it to work in the field.

None of it is easy – fields of tears! None of it happens by magic. And an outcome like we achieved is by no stretch guaranteed. We might just as easily have ended up back in the CSIRO tearoom drumming up a new idea for superconductivity.

The GIRD program was important to our success, but it lasted just 5 years. Itw as a victim of impatience. What a waste!

Too often, we set up a program and then expect it to deliver overnight.

And yet high-temperature superconductivity, the photonics industry, and the laser industry, to name just a few were all funded by the GIRD program, and only came to fruition 15 years or more after the program was discontinued.

We’ll be better placed to achieve our goals if we give things time. As an example, the new programs in place now offer good end-to-end innovation support for the first time. 

- University researchers can access the On program to create a start-up.
- Start-ups can use the Australian Economic Accelerator to create their proof of concept.
- Then there’s the Industry Growth Program to create prototypes to the point where they’re investable.
- And finally, the National Reconstruction Fund for scale-up. 

Some things are not quite right yet. 

More clarity is needed about how non-dilutive funds can be accessed by industry to support what Mary O’Kane – the former NSW Chief Scientist and Engineer – calls “applied fundamental research”, which industry says it needs. And we still need to get the settings right to shift the dial on business investment in R&D, as I said.

But once the systems are in place, the important thing is to give them time to bed down, time to iron out the wrinkles, to build awareness and to allow investors and others to feel confident that the supports are in place, and we’ll stay the course. 

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This applies to individual projects which also need patience over decades. I always think of big projects as children.
We love them when they’re babies. We heap care and attention on them.

But by the time they become teenagers it gets difficult – you need to bite your tongue, find the love, and look for ways to help them through what can be difficult years for the whole family.

Similarly, the teenage years of a project are a nightmare – every project I’ve been involved with has had an adolescent moment. 

For any teenagers in the room, and my own children, please don’t take this the wrong way. You were lovely! 

Then, when your children grow up and leave school, that’s when they need money – so it’s a different kind of hard work. 

Until finally, they emerge and become independent. They begin to add value, and the world sees them for those wonderful humans you always knew them to be.

It’s a quarter-century journey that takes patience and commitment.

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I’m far from the first person to say, give the system time to work. My predecessor, Alan Finkel, made the same point in his work on the energy transition. His mantra was: be ambitious, be patient.

So I want to add something else to the mix – a little bit of country to Alan’s rock and roll.

I want to add belief. Belief in ourselves as a nation, faith that our goals are achievable. It feels unusual to be using words like faith and belief as Australia’s Chief Scientist, or as a scientist full stop, but there it is.

What do I mean by this? I mean it’s one thing to have an ambition. It’s another to believe that the ambition is achievable – and that we’re up to the task.

It takes a leap of faith to know we can build a quantum computer that was such a crazy idea just two decades ago.

We can become a country powered by clean energy with net-zero emissions using PV invented here.

We can produce and export green steel to the world, and transform our transport system to electric power. 

These ambitions are not simply aspirations, New Year’s resolutions, or badges we pin on our jacket to show we’re one of the good guys.

They’re real goals that we can achieve. 

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For Australia, I think this requires a cultural change, a shift in the nation we imagine ourselves to be. Cultural change is hard, perhaps especially so in a country like ours where we have so much to protect. 

Our tendency to resist change has its advantages. We guard our prosperity, our lifestyle, our institutions, and our freedom, well. But it has its disadvantages. It risks stifling creativity and creating vanilla outcomes. It can create a real inertia when it comes to tackling difficult things.

I’m not entirely sure where the balance point should sit – but I don’t think we have it right at the moment.

I don’t think we can truly become the innovative, high-tech manufacturing nation powered by clean energy that we aspire to be until we can imagine ourselves as that nation – and then take a leap into developing technologies that are new to us, or where we’re not sure of the exact outcome.

You can think of it like a young person taking that leap of imagination to see themselves in a future career – which is the necessary starting point to embarking on the slog to get there.

It’s often easier to retreat into inaction.

But if we retreat when it comes to clean energy, hedging our bets about new forms of energy, or whether to go in one direction or another, we risk being left behind.

If we prefer to wait and see how things shake down as other countries do the hard work on advanced semiconductor manufacturing, or bioengineering, we miss out on an enormous opportunity that leverages Australia’s strengths. 

If we continue to be risk averse, for example, on sharing data, we will stymie the possibilities in health and societal planning. And if we drum our fingers and wonder when to make a move on the circular economy, we play it safe – but only at the expense of yet another opportunity for transformation. 

Instead of fearing the consequences of AI, robotics, automation and new forms of energy, we need to back ourselves and know that we can harness these technologies to make a better life for ourselves and our children.

This is all the more important now when there is so much uncertainty about the trajectory of other nations on clean energy and emerging technologies. 

We need to be prepared to step up and lead, to question things that we have taken for granted, our ingrained habits, and even the things we think are sacrosanct. 

The contest of ideas is not always a comfortable arena, but that’s where the gold lies.

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Of course, this is more difficult than the words suggest. Sometimes I feel quite lucky that my wheelhouse is the science and research. 

As I said, from where I sit, the only thing that can get in the way are the laws of physics. One of my favourite experiments in high school was a demonstration of parabolic motion. 

You roll a ball down an incline, and then let it fly off the edge of a table. The physics part was to determine where it would land. We held up a board to mark where the ball would hit it as it sailed through the air – and then made several other measurements as the ball got closer to the ground. 

Using these datapoints, we were able to predict where the ball would land every time – and put the paper cup in the right place to catch it.

What we had developed was an equation for parabolic motion that holds true for any ball, any object travelling through space anywhere – a predictive equation that told us what was going to happen in the future from something as seemingly unpredictable as the roll of a ball. 

For me as a school student, I could have faith that the calculations would hold and the ball would land in the cup. 

That was an absolutely pivotal moment for me. It was the first time I saw the power of physics to predict what would happen – and after that physics for me was unstoppable.

This is an illustration of what I mean by taking a leap of faith – not a wild stab with no evidence to back you.  But a mindset that says trust the foundations, trust the science, and the systems that have been set up to drive innovation, trust the calculations, and then take a leap of faith. 

Plunge into the wild teenage years – knowing we will get though them and they’ll be worth it. 

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I started by saying I would end on an optimistic note, so hear it is.

I truly believe we can achieve the goals we have for our economy and society over the next quarter century. That’s because I heard a remarkably unanimous vision for Australia when I travelled around the country last year leading the national conversation that informed the new Science and Research Priorities, on behalf of the government.  

It’s because I know we have the smarts, the deep expertise that has grown out of the strength of our university system, and research institutions such as the CSIRO.

Am I confident that we will let go of the things that hold us back, our habits, inertial systems, and fears about new technologies? 

Because it’s almost Christmas and my term is ending in a few weeks, I’m going to say yes!  I’ll make that leap of faith.
I’ve had the most extraordinary four years.  I’ve discovered the enormous convening power of the role of the Chief Scientist. It’s an extraordinarily privileged position. 

People answer my emails and they’re willing to drop everything and support me when I ask for help.

I told you about my childhood pastime of taking things apart to work out how the different pieces worked.  As Chief Scientist, I’ve been lucky enough to have the backing of the whole science and research system, the innovation system, the public service, industry and Government, all of those people to help me put the pieces together again.

I’m proud at what we’ve done.

And I really just want to thank everyone for this incredible support.

And I leave you with one final thought – that by working together, by collaborating, we can make Australia the country we want it to be.

Thank you very much.

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