Our country's luck will run out if you don't fund research properly

As well as forming synergistic collaborations, these centres naturally spawn successful commercial ventures, because high-tech venture capital depends on deep technical advantage.

Spinouts over the past decade in fields spanning quantum, photonics, sensing, and synthetic biology have valuations exceeding $4 billion. That output happened largely without a coherent commercialisation strategy across the centres, leaving substantial untapped potential.

Today, Centres of Excellence, industry partners, and investors are coming together in Sydney to launch ARTIC, the Australian Research Translation and Innovation Consortium. Our goal is to work together to improve the research to translation ecosystem in Australia.

At present, our efforts are fragmented and sub-scale.

Working together we can use the collective expertise to embed commercial thinking early on in our research, provide appropriate mentoring and support to those with entrepreneurial ideas, and better connect our knowledge to the people and capital that can take an idea to a real-world outcome.

The government's decision to become an associate to Pillar II of Horizon Europe, the EU's 93.5-billion-euro research program addressing global challenges, presents an extraordinary opportunity, provided we build leading capability in our focus areas.

Capturing value from this global pool requires generating foundational knowledge through basic research, then translating that knowledge into projects capable of competing globally.

Centres of Excellence are built for this task because they generate at-scale, world-class knowledge. ARTIC will help make Australian research Pillar II-ready, equipping our teams to lead international consortiums at a global scale.

The International Monetary Fund estimates that a 10 per cent increase in a nation's stock of basic scientific research leads to an average 0.3 per cent increase in productivity.

For Australia, a sustained 10 per cent boost in research funding, roughly $750 million per year, would eventually yield an extra $8 billion per year in annual GDP.

But these are not dollars Treasury can capture in four-year forward estimates; they take a decade or more to eventuate, reflecting the long-term payoff of fundamental discovery across advanced economies.

Elected officials are impatient, all 15 science ministers I have interacted with over the past 15 years have wanted to get more out of their research dollar.

But it is important to remember that successful translation starts first with the stock of basic research knowledge, and undertaking a zero-sum game where directed research is increased at basic research's expense will be self-defeating.

The government's commissioned report Ambitious Australia: Strategic Examination of R&D highlights the essential role of basic research, and notes "funding for basic research provided through competitive grants has been in real decline for over a decade".

The Ambitious Australia report correctly, in my view, asserts the need to focus our top-down applied research into areas of national need where we are internationally competitive.

But extreme care needs to be used when mixing applied and basic research, with the two streams having separate timescales, and requiring different governance of selection and accountability.

Getting the ecosystem right is paramount. We need a strong bottom-up basic research program based around excellence, top-down priority areas governed to deliver against their objectives, and a vibrant commercial research sector able to convert knowledge into income.

People and ideas should be supported to move across the three domains with as little friction as possible.

I, for one, am very sad to see the highly successful ARC Centres of Excellence replaced in the National Competitive Grants Program Policy Review by the new Prioritise Scheme which is limited now to "addressing a priority of national or global significance, identified through a whole-of-government process ... or the ARC Board", and needs to be signed off by the minister of the day.

This top-down structure of what was our premier basic research program will further erode our investment in the stock of basic knowledge that the IMF rates as so valuable.

Would the ARC Centres of Excellence for quantum-atom optics and quantum computer technology have been funded under this new program?

When they were launched in 2002, quantum was far from being a marketable national priority, yet they laid the foundation for our current national leadership and a billion dollars worth of venture capital investment.

Singapore presents a sharp contrast. As chair of its Academic Research Council, I oversee about $300 million allocated purely on academic merit each year.

Priority-driven projects are funded similarly, but managed separately by the National Research Foundation with fit-for-purpose governance.

Singapore is the closest thing to a technocracy in the world. It knows it has nothing other than its people, and invests in its stock of knowledge with extreme care and urgency.

Meanwhile, the US which we have long relied on as our principal supplier of knowledge capacity, is seemingly throwing its world leadership away in research as it descends into a state that might be best described as an idiocracy tending towards autocracy.

In Australia, we need to ask ourselves, are we content at being a mediocracy, where we continue to bank on being the lucky country into the indefinite future?

My fellow researchers and I want to help our country make a little more of its own luck - and we hope we will be supported by upcoming research policy announcements that really are as ambitious as the Strategic Examination of R&D's title.