On 26 May 2015 the Australian Government announced new national Science and Research Priorities. Nine cross-disciplinary priorities towards which researchers will now scramble are food, soil and water, transport, cybersecurity, energy, resources, advanced manufacturing, environmental change and health. Additional detail is available here.
Two positive aspects to the announcement are that (i) recognition is given to the priorities as being cross-disciplinary and such research will be stimulated and (ii) the range of priorities is quite broad. However, the range is not broad enough and once again the tendency for governments to try and pick winners in research needs to come under closer scrutiny.
Readers are told that research is an investment in the future and that resources are limited, in other words capital rationing needs to be imposed, the government coffers are not a bottomless pit. There is a need for innovation, for commercial returns to be boosted. The areas of research funded will be ‘the most immediate problems facing the nation’. Only over time will an ‘increased proportion of Australian Government research investment allocated on a strategic basis to areas critical need and national importance.’
There seems to be little engagement in the promised Australian research frontiers with the stuff of industry: finance and accounting. Indeed, neither is mentioned and yet both oil the wheels of industry. Together both have affected more people than just about any other priority recognised by the Australian Government. The Global Financial Crisis has been forgotten too soon, and at a time when the very financial and accounting issues which almost took the world to disaster and from which many are still reeling some 7 years later is rearing its ugly head again.
Built in to each and every cross-disciplinary team of researchers should be academics with some research knowledge about finance and accounting innovations and how to cut them down to size when they are unethical. There is a need for development of ethical innovative mechanisms for letting the captains of industry and other stakeholders (including voters) know when their actions hurt society, hurt suppliers, hurt, employees, hurt communities, irrespective of successful STEM innovations.
The time to act is now before the next inexplicable GFC. Australia’s Business Deans need to look outside their tunnelled vision, think cross-disciplinary (and beyond narrow Australian Government defined Fields of Research), channel their disciplinary resources in these ventures and link strongly with the STEM disciplines and reward those that do so – just as real, innovative, ethical businesses do.
Roger Burritt 