Over halfway through its first term, it is clear that the Labour-led coalition doesn’t have a vision for how science can transform the economy.
Yes there was a handful of science line items in Thursday’s Wellbeing Budget, offering welcome investment in things like renewable energy research, the initiative to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from agriculture and the effort to stop Kauri dieback.
But there was no substantive new funding for the hardworking scientists in our universities and publicly funded research labs involved in the fundamental research that could actually transform our economy.
We woefully under invest in basic research in this country. That’s a problem because the evidence shows that countries, such as the United States, that invest heavily in fundamental research, reap the rewards long term and across the economy.
The two Stanford PhD students who founded Google were initially funded by a US National Science Foundation grant. In 2017, Google’s parent company Alphabet spent US$16.6 billion on R&D. Talk about a return on investment.
Still, there’s no point in us dishing out more funding without a coherent plan. We’ve got issues that run deeper than a lack of dollars. Dr Heide Friedrich, the president of the New Zealand Association of Scientists, put her finger on it last Thursday.
“I am wondering how universities and [Crown Research Institutes] can adapt their often massive operations to better incubate and work with start-ups to align with the Government’s desire to support more radical and disruptive innovations?”, she said.
Our innovation system isn’t firing. We aren’t creating a significant pipeline of ideas that can be translated into world-leading innovations by our businesses. Our small research system is too competitive, too complex, too hard to work with.
The Government hopes its 15 per cent R&D tax credit, which took effect from April, will boost the R&D undertaken in the private sector. It won’t unless we tackle some of those structural issues.
Labour has just tinkered around the edges. Now it must look hard at the research system and make the necessary changes, as potentially disruptive as they may be.
We’ve had our first Wellbeing Budget. If we are to afford more of them, we need a serious rethink of our approach to science and innovation.
Originally published on Stuff.co.nz.
Photo credit: National Cancer Institute, Unsplash.
PETER GRIFFIN 