Madeleine King (Brand, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I rise today to speak in support, albeit reluctant support, of the government's proposed Australian Astronomical Observatory (Transition) Bill 2018. This bill seeks to amend the Australian Astronomical Observatory Act 2010 to amend the short title of the act, substitute a new outline for the act and abolish the Australian Astronomical Observatory and the AAO Advisory Committee.

This bill seeks to abolish the Australian Astronomical Observatory and allow for its function to be transitioned to two consortiums to manage the functions of the body. The functions that are now being outsourced, so to speak, are the operation of 3.9-metre Anglo-Australian Telescope on land owned by the Australian National University at Siding Spring near Coonabarabran in New South Wales, which is to be transferred to a consortium led by the very able ANU, and the operation of the astronomical instrumentation capability at North Ryde in Sydney, which is to be transferred to a consortium led by Macquarie University.

This legislation will give effect to the 2017-18 budget measure on access to world-leading astronomy infrastructure, which saw Australia sign up to a strategic partnership with the European Southern Observatory. This powerful strategic partnership allows Australian optical astronomers access to one of the most advanced telescopes in the world at the La Silla Paranal Observatory in Chile. This is a great thing. This strategic partnership will cost, in Commonwealth funding, $119.2 million over the decade from 2017, or $26.1 million over the forward estimates from 2017-18 to 2020-21. I know that many working in the field, many Australian astronomers, have for years argued the case for greater access to these facilities, so it's good to see that we are encouraging and facilitating that as a nation.

This legislation adheres to the most recent 10-year strategic plan, the decadal plan for Australian astronomy 2016-2025, produced by the Academy of Science, which has called for access to eight-metre class optical astronomy infrastructure that is currently not available in this country. The plan also calls for maintenance of efforts in terms of support for Australian domestic capability, including supporting the Australian national observatory and its capabilities. It is encouraging that we in this place are facilitating this vital research, and I'm very pleased this is happening. However, we in the Labor Party are reluctantly supporting this legislation, because, like most things on this government's agenda, it does seek to cut corners wherever it can. This government cares a bit more about how well or badly they are doing in the polls than about the future of this nation and its innovators and researchers.

This legislation proposes to off-load the main government astronomical assets, the Anglo-Australian Telescope near Coonabarabran and the AAO instrumentation, onto the Australian university sector. That's right: this government is seeking to off-load the work to our universities, which, as we already know, are apprehensive about funding arrangements and cuts due to this government's failure to provide certainty and proper funding to the sector. This government, which is quite happy to cut university funding by $2.2 billion over the next four years, is trying to force unis down the path of a deregulation system, which has failed before, by starving them of critical infrastructure funding as well as ongoing funding. At the same time, they're expecting universities to stump up the cash to keep these key astronomy facilities operational. It is quite a burden this government is seeking to put on the university sector without giving them additional funding. And this is ostensibly done to save the budget $26.1 million over the forward estimates. It's just another bit of trickery, if you ask me. What's happening is they are moving the burden of maintaining these facilities from the Department of Innovation, Industry and Science onto entities that are funded by the Department of Education and Training. As I said, it puts further strain on an already overstretched university sector, which is so important to this country, and on to its overall research infrastructure.

The transition is not without cost. It is expected that a small number of jobs will be lost in this transition: four to five at the Anglo-Australian Telescope and up to another nine at the North Ryde instrumentation laboratories. This is a government that has been spruiking an innovation nation, yet is happy to cull the jobs of some of the brightest researchers and technicians in the country. And by constraining universities, their funding and their research funding, this government continues to put our researchers down, whether they be researchers in social sciences, humanities or the technical sciences that we're talking about today.

Australia is a world leader in the field of astronomy, and we have worked very hard in this place to maintain this regional leadership. Currently the Department of Innovation, Industry and Science has two broad groups that manage Australia's government astronomy assets in partnership with the research community. The first group is the Australian Square Kilometre Array office. It is managing our engagement with the construction of the very exciting Square Kilometre Array, half of which is being built in Western Australia while the other half is being built in South Africa. This will become the world's most advanced radio telescope. I had a bit to do with the establishment of the International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research, headquartered at UWA, and also worked with great partners at Curtin University on the other side of the great Swan River.

ICRAR, the International Centre of Radio Astronomy Research, as part of the Square Kilometre Array effort, has made great advancements. Just recently, they reached a very important milestone with the first SKA-low prototype station being completed on site at Murchison, which has that very wonderful radio quiet that is an asset of that part of Western Australia. ICRAR also provides a remarkable opportunity for science outreach in this country, as does astronomy in general. ICRAR, through its work at Astrofest held at Curtin University, has seen more than 2½ thousand people come along and access very high-quality optical telescopes to not only learn a bit more about the important science that is going on in the international centre itself and the development of the SKA, but also for the pure enjoyment and love of looking further into the sky with the optical telescopes out there at Bentley.

The other Australian astronomy group managed by the department is the Australian Astronomical Observatory, which, since 2010, has managed access to the Anglo-Australian Telescope and maintained our national optical instrumentation capability. It's based in North Ryde, in Sydney. This legislation will abolish the AAO as a division of the department on 1 July this year, along with all AAO governance structures. The legislation also seeks to allow the transfer of necessary assets to external entities, in this case the two university-based and university-funded consortiums. As I said before, the consortium for the Anglo-Australian Telescope will be led by the ANU and it will include Curtin University and UWA—two of our great universities in Western Australia—as well as Macquarie University, Monash University, Swinburne University of Technology, University of Melbourne, University of New South Wales, University of Queensland, University of Southern Queensland, University of Sydney, University of Tasmania, and Western Sydney University. So it's a quite remarkable consortium of universities that, whilst having their funding cut by this government, are also expected to chip in to maintain the Anglo-Australian Telescope. The establishment of a national optical instrumentation capability which will build on and further develop the world-class instrumentation functions of the AAO will be led by Macquarie University and Australia Astronomy Limited.

When it was first constructed, the Anglo-Australian Telescope was one of the most advanced in the world and its operation gave Australian and international scientists access to the stars above in an unparalleled fashion. Additionally, it helped develop Australia's advanced scientific and industrial capabilities. However, this facility is now 44 years old. Despite this, it remains an important part of Australia's research infrastructure and we on this side of the House are relieved to see that these assets, as part of the AAO, will be maintained for the next seven years, making the AAT a very important and remaining-vibrant 51-year-old workhorse. While its future beyond that timeframe is not known, I'm sure this government have some plan in mind to keep it going. Especially given the fact that they wouldn't mind seeing us all work until we're 70 years of age before we have access to a pension, why should research facilities be any different?

What effect does this bill have on the astronomical research sector? We scrutinised this bill carefully, as we do all bills. It seeks to maintain and strengthen Australia's position as a first-class nation at the forefront of astronomical research by underscoring the need for access to world-class facilities, and that is something I most certainly support. It recognises that, in order to push forward into the next generation of research about the galaxy, our facilities need multinational partners to fund and construct on the scale and complexity that is required. We know that Australia has already begun to transition from a national research infrastructure portfolio of medium-tiered nationally-owned facilities into multinational partnerships worth billions that create world-class landmark research facilities, and this has been undertaken over many decades. Following on from this, Australia is already playing a critical role in two of the world's biggest billion-dollar astronomy projects: the SKA, which I spoke of earlier, and the Giant Magellan Telescope, which is seeking to be the very first of an entirely new class of extremely large telescopes, as they're referred to, as Australia constructs key components and instrumentation for the project. Both the GMT and the SKA represent a massive increase in the capabilities of these types of instruments and it's matched by a massive leap in the physical size of the telescope. Indeed, the last time such a massively sized leap in scale happened, humanity discovered other solar systems, the black hole, the centre of our galaxy, the Milky Way, and evidence of the universe's continued acceleration.

With such advances in technology, what results is great excitement and proof that the future in this sector is bright. However, future advances will require a sustained and long-term approach to research funding. Many researchers in the country will be well aware of the strains put upon them due to short-termism in government and in university funding agreements. In a former life, I spent 10 years working for the University of Western Australia and witnessed the move from longer-term funding contracts in research to short-term funding contracts, which led to scientists and researchers from all parts of the combined research endeavour leaving that sector and the public losing the capacity of great researchers across all our universities.

It should be noted while we talk about science and astronomical science in this place that, over the past five years, government support for science has been falling. It's now at its lowest share of GDP since 2005. The government's share of total research spending is now smaller than at any time since the 1980s, and that's a sad thing, in my opinion. Research funding is skewing more towards applied research than basic research. Continued mediocre investment in research and, in my view, this government's disgraceful dismissal of universities and the realities of their funding challenges endanger overall research effort.

I'm very pleased to talk about science and research in this place. I spruik at any time I get the chance that the developments made in this nation based on science are remarkable. We would not have been able to develop the south-west of Western Australia as a great agricultural effort without the agricultural scientists who identified the missing elements in our soil that meant that we could not grow wheat so well or that the sheep would die of Denmark wasting disease. Science has played a remarkable part in the development of my state, so, in talking about science, I'm pleased that Labor is committed to ensuring that, by 2030, three per cent of our national gross domestic product will be applied to science research and development. Under Labor, science research, innovation and education will be and are national priorities. We will have a dedicated cabinet minister for science, and that is critical to support efforts not only in the Australian astronomical area—as we have in this bill—but also across all regions of science and research in this country.

I mentioned before that research is a long-term proposition. We need longer-term funding arrangements with, of course, proper accountability. Researchers and scientists need some certainty for their careers so that we don't drive them out of the very important endeavours that they're undertaking at research institutions and universities around this country. I'm a keen supporter of science in this country, particularly the work undertaken at universities. I objected very strongly when the minister for education, Senator Birmingham, accused universities of having rivers of gold. It only demonstrated his total lack of understanding of how universities are funded and how the money that comes from student fees has cross-subsidised the research effort in this country. In my view, this country has to face up to the challenge of science and research funding so that we might have a better future for all young people—like those who are watching from the gallery—so they have the opportunity to study science and do research at schools and at university.

See this speech in context