Last week the TIN100 came out. It’s a magazine that follows the NZ high tech sector. It’s findings were once again remarkable. This sector is now a $6.6 billion industry. Its offshore revenue is larger than meat, wood or wool – 77% of that is generated from offshore. It continued to grow through the recession.
Its potential is obvious, not only as an exporter, but as a generator of smart knowledged based jobs. It harnesses Kiwi innovation, ideas and gets them out there, despite our geography. Remarkable stuff.
But it challenges the idea of many that NZ should stick to its knitting and continue to pour the bulk of our science investment in the primary produce / agricultural sector.
We need both.
The high tech sector has the potential to grow (without food miles), but it’s not going to happen over night. It needs further investment in science, support with capital and exporting. Most importantly it needs a realisation of the importance of backing innovators and what they are doing.
Australia recently gave a 45% tax break to its innovation companies for R and D. Don’t expect this government to come out with anything as forward looking.
Unlike our farmers, the people who run these high tech businesses can pick up and work anywhere in the world. We need them here for NZ.
Science and innovation featured highly in John Key’s address on Tuesday. And so it should. This area offers real growth prospects for NZ’s economy. It’s not the short term fix that the government wants to get it re-elected, but it’s essential for NZ if we want to aim for the top of the OECD ladder. Finland, Denmark, Sweden, Singapore – countries which spend the highest proportions of GDP per capita on R and D understand that. So does Australia which lifted its spending by 25% last year. They know that ideas and innovation are going to give them the edge and grow their economies.
So, if there is one place for a step change it’s here.
So it was good to see John Key say that:
“NZ’s future economic performance depends to a large extent on generating and using new ideas”.
And …
“our objective is a high-performing public science system which supports economic growth, and a wider innovation system that encourages firms to increase their investment in, take-up, and application of research”.
Good stuff. This could be the Labour Party speaking.
But it all felt rather empty a couple of paragraphs down. He said:
‘The fiscal situation means that future new spending allowances can only be very modest, and most agencies will miss out on funding increases altogether’.
He didn’t say that out loud in parliament.
Fine words, no action. There is likely to be a re-shuffle of the crown research institutes in the coming days, and perhaps that’s needed, but don’t look for a step change.
I am not sure about the title of the series of articles that the NZ Herald is running in response to the Brash Taskforce, but the first from Auckland University Vice-Chancellor Stuart McCutcheon is a good one. I don’t agree with McCutcheon in terms of his comments re interest free student loans and student support, but his overall view that we must increase funding for research and education is undoubtedly true, and the real lack of doing this is one of the great shames of New Zealand’s response to the recession. The full article is worth a read, but this paragraph probably sums it up
I would invest in education, valuing our teachers – from pre-school to professors – as the professionals they truly are. I would focus on supporting our most able students to continue on to postgraduate study and research careers, rather than terminating the very scholarships that keep our best doctoral students in New Zealand, as the government has recently done.
How safe is the food we eat? I’ve related my Dad’s story of twigging 50 years ago to why his Canadian-resident mate’s sex drive had shrivelled; it was due to the estrogen being pumped into battery-raised chickens. Until last year, I would have thought that such practices were a thing of the distant past. But as a member of the Primary Production Committee, I got to ask some questions mid-year of the NZ Food Safety Authority.
Information provided to the committee told us that NZFSA was doing some studies about the use of antibiotics in factory-raised chickens. (Large amounts of antibiotics are required when chickens are stacked three and four a time into cages with an A4 size of space.) The NZFSA officials said that the studies they had done were not “conclusive” about whether the antibiotics used have any impact on human health. So what, I asked, where they doing to provide some assurance to us as New Zealanders who eat dozens of kgs of chicken per capita every year. The NZFSA’s anwer was that it was doing some more studies!
Forgive the pun, but isn’t this rather putting the egg before the chicken? Should we be eating chicken fed antibiotics if it is inconclusive that this will not do us any harm? I didn’t ask the question of NZFSA about whether estrogen is still fed to chickens here. Others might know?
I plan to follow it up, most especially since my good buddy Moana Mackey’s post about the guy in Louisiana who developed breasts and lost facial hair because he was eating chicken necks. The supposition is that because these include thyroid glands, this might be where estrogen is concentrated. I know from reading The Omnivore’s Dilemma that estrogen is fed to beef cattle in the US. This and the use of corn on feedlots has seen the average age of cattle at slaughter in the US reduce from perhaps 4 years a century ago to 14-16 months. Chickens, be they US or NZ, are raised in a matter of weeks. Yes, it does provide cheap food but it seems to me that animial welfare and human welfare are both short of what they deserve.
Barack Obama is facing all kinds of issues in the US at the moment- healthcare reform, whether to put more troops into Afghanistan, climate change, you name it. All the while, he faces huge expectations on the left and visceral anger on the right.
But one thing he can point to is a stimulus package that has made some big investments in covers green jobs, extensive social assistance and research. The stimulus package included $21.5 billion in funding for research and development, particularly in leading edge genetic research. The money has been spread around the US, and is having a great effect in encouraging research where private sector funding has dried up.
This is the kind of long term thinking that has been missing from NZ’s response to the recession. Of course we don’t have $21 billion to do this, but our government has set on the sidelines, and worse still pulled back from research funding. If we want to improve productivity and develop a new economy, we need large scale investment. On this issue, the Obama administration is showing the way. (Hat tip: Lloyd Morrison)
I was one of those who applauded the appointment of a chief science advisor by the Prime Minister. One of his jobs is to evaluate the evidence base on which decisions are made.
I wonder then what input then he had on the decision that has led to the withdrawal of funding for science advisors who run professional development courses for teachers and support them developing their science teaching skills. I think science is a vital area for a modern economy and the cut goes a few steps too far.
From the house yesterday:
Hon Trevor Mallard: Can the Minister explain to the House the effect of her decision to cut science advice to schools by 100 percent next year on national standards for science going forward?
Hon Anne Tolley: People in the education sector told me quite clearly during the election campaign that they were sick of the Labour Government, which had given them a whole number of initiatives without sufficient resources, so we have reduced the number of initiatives and focused the resources on those remaining. National standards in literacy and numeracy are the top priority. They can be taught right across the curriculum-in science, geography, history, or whatever. We are focusing our resources on supporting schools to implement national standards in literacy and numeracy.
Hon Trevor Mallard: I raise a point of order, Mr Speaker. I know that somewhere towards the end of that answer the Minister mentioned science, but it was a pretty direct question on the effect on science standards of the 100 percent cut in science advice to schools. That question was not addressed.
Mr Speaker: I listened carefully to the Minister’s answer, and it seemed to me that she implied that that programme was one of the initiatives that the Government was not supporting. I cannot ask her to further answer it, unless the member wants to ask a further supplementary question
I get hassled a lot by colleagues (in a loving caring way of course) about being the resident science geek. I’m fascinated by things which make my colleagues eyes glaze over. I think really bad science jokes are funny (best science pick up line? If I was an enzyme I’d be DNA Helicase so I could unzip your genes…). I look forward to my copy of ‘New Scientist’ arriving every week. I MySky ‘The Big Bang Theory’.
But it’s not always easy being a scientist in Aotearoa. Too often I hear experienced scientists saying that they would never advise their children to go into a career in science. The funding, the security, and the opportunities just arent there. Too often science and research are seen as luxuries, rather than critical to our economic wellbeing. When the going gets tough, the budgets are cut, with this years budget a case in point. So from a scientists point of view imagine how incredible this speech from President Obama was:
This is watershed stuff. The biggest single investment in R&D ever in USA history. Obama understands that the future is not in being the purchaser of others discoveries and knowledge, or in being a fast follower. It’s an exciting time to be a scientist in the US of A.
Which is not to say it’s all doom and gloom in Godzone. Far from it. Our students are scientifically very literate, we rate well in terms of papers published and basic research, and there’s some incredible science being carried out. But so much more needs to be done.
This week I attended Auckland University’s “Incredible Science” expo, and there’s no doubt that kids love it. Thousands of kids coming along to do science and maths in their school holidays and having an absolute blast. Kids fighting over who gets to do the next experiment. One little guy was watching a simulation of a tornado, his mouth hanging open and his eyes bulging out. He was eating a marmite sandwich and he’d frozen in mid-chew, holding the sandwich right up to his mouth. He literally dropped the sandwich on to the floor and never even noticed.
We all have a natural fascination with how nature/the planet/our bodies/the solar system etc etc work, and these kids absolutely demonstrated that. But it made me think, where the hell do we lose them?
It’s hard for me to know what it is that turns people off choosing science and maths as a career because from as early as I can remember I never anticipated doing anything else. When I was six we learnt how to draw a diagram of an insect at primary school and for months I obsessively scrawled the figures in books, on walls, in fact anywhere I could. All anatomically correct and labelled. My parents were convinced I was either going to be a scientist or a serial killer. But my dad did tell me that he had no idea how to encourage my interest. If I’d said I wanted to win Wimbledon, he would’ve know exactly what to do (after he’d picked himself up off the floor laughing), he’d enrol me in a club or get me some lessons. But science? Not so easy. In the end my parents bought me a microscope set, a stackload of books, crossed their fingers and hoped for the best.
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