Engineers Australia Gippsland Group – Innovation in Engineering 

Maria Vamvakinou MHR
Chair, House of Representatives Standing Committee on Industry, Science and Innovation 

Representing Senator Kim Carr, Minister for Innovation, Industry, Science and Research 

8 December 2008
Century Inn
Traralgon, Victoria 

It’s a great pleasure to be back in Gippsland once again.

It’s nice to recognise some faces in the room familiar to me from my visit to Morwell earlier in the year for Innovation Gippsland 2008.

Let me begin by passing on the apologies of Senator Kim Carr, the Minister for Innovation, Industry, Science and Research, who is unable to be with us tonight.

Meeting future challenges

This evening I want to talk about how best we can respond to the challenges confronting Australia – and I’m not just talking about the current global economic crisis.

I’m talking about long-term challenges like climate change, the rise of low-cost competitors and our ageing population – which has serious implications for the supply of skills and the structure of our workforce.

Even when we get through today’s tough times, these problems will still be there.

The international slowdown hasn’t made solving them any easier, but Australia is in much better shape than many other countries.

The government has taken strong action to stabilise the financial system, stimulate economic activity, and shield the most vulnerable from the worst effects of the crisis.

We will do whatever it takes to weather the storm raging around us today, but we are also focusing squarely on the challenges and opportunities of tomorrow.

That means making Australia more productive, more creative, and more competitive.

It means investing in education, infrastructure and innovation.

It means building partnerships with industry to generate new investment and new jobs.

Innovation and competitive advantage

Innovation is central to everything we do.

We can’t compete with the rest of the world on price alone.

We can’t win the race to the bottom – and I don’t think anyone seriously believes we should try.

Australia has a high standard of living, and most of us want to keep it that way.

We want our children to enjoy the same advantages, the same prosperity and the same quality of life that we enjoy – if not better.

To achieve that, we need to be in the race to the top.

The prizes in this race won’t go the cheapest countries, but to the most innovative.

Instead of trying to compete purely on price, we should be competing on quality, safety, originality, design, environmental responsibility – all the things you get when you invest in innovation.

The experiences Ian has described this evening are a reminder that Australia does have the capacity to develop unique products, services, skills and ideas that people half a world away will want to buy.

We do have the agility and flexibility to stay in – and ahead – of the game.

We have the power to create competitive advantage by investing in the country’s physical and intellectual capacity.

The government has set about providing a framework for that investment by conducting three major reviews in the innovation portfolio.

Progress on reviews

One was the Bracks review of the automotive industry.

We have already responded to that review with A New Car Plan for a Greener Future, which will provide up to $6.2 billion to make the industry economically and environmentally sustainable by 2020.

The plan is expected to generate at least $16 billion in industry investment over its thirteen-year life.

It will get Australia developing and manufacturing low-emission, fuel-efficient vehicles – the kind of vehicles the world increasingly wants.

This is the key to creating well-paid, highly-skilled green jobs for the future.

While Steve Bracks was reviewing the car industry, Professor Roy Green was taking a close look at the textile, clothing and footwear industries.

The government believes there is a real future for these industries in Australia.

That future won’t involve competing with China or the Philippines in the production of tee-shirts.

It must involve competing with other first-world countries that have entrenched themselves at the high end of the market – like Germany in technical textiles, or Italy in fashion.

The government expects to respond to Professor Green’s review early next year.

The third review was of the national innovation system.

The review panel chaired by Dr Terry Cutler has done a great job of:

·              clarifying the roles different sectors and institutions play in the Australian innovation system

·              identifying ways to address gaps and imbalances

·              and suggesting innovation principles and priorities to focus our efforts and maximise the return on our investments.

The panel has made seventy-two recommendations covering all aspects of the innovation system.

It drew particular attention to the centrality of engineering to innovation (p. 51), and the need to expand Australia’s engineering skills if we want to lift our innovation performance in the future (p. 49).

The review panel also highlighted the Warren Centre’s observation that people who use engineering services – including governments – often lack the technical and commercial know-how to “take advantage of the … engineering innovation available” (p. 137).

This raises a more general point about the changing nature of innovation, which is increasingly mobilised by pull from users rather than push from technology.

A country’s innovation performance isn’t just a function of how smart its producers are – it is also a function of how smart its consumers are.

That’s why education is so important.

That’s why the innovation review panel says: “A truly creative and innovative society requires a broad range of inputs spanning all areas, including science, technology and engineering, as well the creative arts.” (p. 47)

That’s why the government wants to build a pervasive culture of innovation.

We are now preparing an innovation white paper to guide the building process over the next decade and beyond.

The white paper will be released in the new year.

New CRC round

In tandem with the innovation review, we also asked Professor Mary O’Kane – a member of the review panel – to conduct a separate review of the Cooperative Research Centres Program.

Just over a week ago Senator Carr launched the eleventh CRC selection round under new guidelines based on Professor O’Kane’s recommendations.

In particular, the guidelines reinstate public good as an assessment criterion and broaden the program to include the humanities, arts and social sciences.

We are very proud of the CRC Program – it is one of the late John Button’s great legacies to Australia – and we expect the updated guidelines to take it in exciting new directions.

Building Australia’s Research Capacity

Before leaving the subject of reviews, I would like to put in a plug for the review of research training and research workforce issues in Australian universities recently completed by the House of Representatives Standing Committee on Industry, Science and Innovation, which I chair.

Our investigation established three important points.

First, you can’t start preparing people for research careers at university.

The process has to begin at school – even at primary school.

If children don’t get an adequate foundation there – especially in enabling disciplines like maths, the sciences, history and modern languages – their later learning and research options will be limited.

Second, training the Australian research workforce of the future will require a high degree of collaboration – not just between universities, but between the higher education sector, the schools sector, and industry.

OECD figures suggest Australia has about eight PhDs per thousand members of the workforce, compared to eleven in the United States, twenty in Germany, and twenty-eight in Switzerland.

The whole economy stands to benefit from increasing the number of high-level researchers working outside the academy – in business, community organisations and government.

It therefore makes sense to get everyone involved in research training.

The third point is that inadequate funding for research training and research careers remains a fundamental obstacle to realising Australia’s full innovation potential.

The government has made important progress in this area.

We are doubling the number of Australian Postgraduate Awards for budding researchers.

We have established a new Future Fellowships Scheme for mid-career researchers.

And we have overhauled support for senior researchers by establishing the Australian Laureate Fellowships Scheme.

These are important initiatives, but we are starting from a long way behind, and we still have some way to go.

My committee – which includes members from both sides of the House – has made thirty-eight recommendations, and we will be pushing hard to ensure they get the consideration we believe they deserve.

Senator Carr should consider himself warned.

Existing programs

Meanwhile, we are pressing ahead with other policy initiatives designed to promote innovation.

These include the $251 million Enterprise Connect network of manufacturing and innovation centres dedicated to giving small and medium-sized businesses better access to new ideas and technologies.

We have already established an innovative regions centre in Geelong and manufacturing centres around the country – including one in Dandenong.

The innovation centre for remote enterprise opens in Alice Springs this week, and innovation centres for mining technology, clean energy, and creative industries will follow in the new year.

The Minister for Defence recently announced funding for an Enterprise Connect Defence Innovation Centre – demonstrating how flexible this model is, and how the network might evolve in the future.

Each of these centres will act as a gateway to the wider innovation system.

For example, an officer from the Industry Capability Network is co-located in the manufacturing centre at Dandenong, the South East Melbourne Manufacturers’ Alliance is in the same building, and negotiations are being finalised to bring Austrade and the CSIRO into the fold.

We already have thirteen Enterprise Connect business advisors on the job around Victoria.

Another important initiative is Clean Business Australia, which supports partnerships with industry to increase energy- and water-efficiency, with the focus on innovative projects that also boost productivity.

The three elements of this $240 million initiative are:

·              Climate Ready, which supports the development and commercialisation of new climate change solutions

·              Re-tooling for Climate Change, which helps manufacturers reduce their environmental footprint

·              and the Green Building Fund, which supports efforts to reduce the energy consumption of commercial office buildings.

Clean Business Australia is one of more than thirty programs delivered by AusIndustry, the Australian Government’s business program delivery division in the Department of Innovation, Industry, Science and Research.

AusIndustry has customer service managers in more than two dozen locations around Australia, plus a national hotline and website.

In Gippsland, you only have to call on Marlene Battista, who will talk to us in a moment and whom I understand is already very well known to many of you here.

Conclusion

Earlier I talked about how we need to harness creativity wherever we find it.

There is clearly a huge amount of creativity to be found in Gippsland.

My visit to the region during Innovation Gippsland back in May left me in no doubt about that.

How do we translate that creative capacity into better social, environmental and economic outcomes for the people of this region and the wider world?

How do we use the region’s most important resource – the intelligence and imagination of its people – to answer today’s challenges and seize tomorrow’s opportunities?

That is the question of the hour.