Nick Champion (Wakefield, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Assistant Minister for Manufacturing and Science) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise to speak on the Australian Astronomical Observatory (Transition) Bill 2018. Labor reluctantly supports this bill, as without our support the bill's failure would result in the closure of the Anglo-Australian Telescope and the Australian Astronomical Observatory laboratories in 2020. The Australian Astronomical Observatory represents a significant national capacity and something that the government should fundamentally support.

The Australian Astronomical Observatory was established in 2010 as a division of the Department of Innovation, Industry, Science and Research. This change was triggered during the global financial crisis by the withdrawal of the UK from the joint funding arrangement with Australia for the operation of the AAT. At that time, funding was secured from the Australian government for the operation of the Australian Astronomical Observatory for 10 years. This is due to expire in July 2020.

This bill is introduced to the House with the purpose of abolishing the Australian Astronomical Observatory and its advisory committee and handing over the operation of the 3.9-metre Anglo-Australian Telescope, commissioned in Siding Spring near Coonabarabran in New South Wales, and the astronomical instrumentation capability in North Ryde in Sydney to consortiums led by the Australian National University and Macquarie University respectively.

This legislation will also give effect to the 2017-2018 budget measure, access to world-leading astronomy infrastructure. This budget measure led Australia to sign a strategic partnership with the European Southern Observatory. This partnership gives the Australian optical astronomers access to one of the most advanced telescopes in the world, the eight-metre—which is the diameter of the surface of the collecting mirror of the telescope, suitably named the Very Large Telescope, or VLT—at the observatory on Cerro Paranal in Chile.

The 10-year strategic partnership signed between the Australian government and the European Southern Observatory is at a cost of $119 million. The scientific community has been exploring a partnership with the Australian government and the European Southern Observatory for a number of years. Australia in the era of global astronomy: the decadal plan for Australian astronomy 2016–2025, produced by the Australian Academy of Science, calls for access to eight-metre-class optical astronomy infrastructure, which is not available in Australia.

The same plan calls for the maintenance of effort in terms of support for an Australian domestic capability, including supporting the Australian Astronomical Observatory and its capabilities. But this legislation proposes to off-load the main government astronomical assets—the Anglo-Australian Telescope near Coonabarabran in New South Wales and the AAO instrumentation capability—onto the Australian university sector. This is ostensibly being done to save the budget $26.1 million over the forward estimates. That's the final funding allocation. But, in reality, this is a sleight of hand, moving the main 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. And there is some irony, that at a time when the government is seeking to cut university funding by $2.2 billion over four years it expects universities to stump up the resources to keep these key astronomy facilities operational.

This transition is not without cost. It is expected that a number of jobs will be lost in this transition. Four to five jobs will go at the Anglo-Australian Telescope, and up to nine jobs at the North Ryde instrumentation laboratories will be lost. One can imagine that those jobs are the jobs of highly skilled individuals who have committed themselves to what is a great national capability.

This bill also does not resolve the funding cliff that has plagued many areas of scientific endeavour in this country. It merely pushes it out by another 10 years. It kicks the can down the road. When the European Southern Observatory strategic partnership expires, the Commonwealth will need to decide whether to become a full member of the European Southern Observatory, seek access for Australian science to another telescope or discontinue this area of scientific leadership in astronomy that our country has long enjoyed. When constructed, the Anglo-Australian Telescope was one of the most advanced telescopes in the world. Its construction and operation have gifted the nation's scientists access to an advanced facility, but it has also developed advanced scientific and industrial capabilities. While it is now 40 years old, the Anglo-Australian Telescope is still an important part of the nation's research infrastructure. Labor is relieved that the assets of the Australian Astronomical Observatory will be maintained for the next seven years. However, their future beyond that date has still not been resolved, and there will be question marks over this government's commitment to this important national capability.

Labor will always support the goal of retaining Australia's capability in optical astronomy. Giving Australian astronomers access to the European Southern Observatory supports this vision. However, ensuring our scientists have access to the best research infrastructure should not come at the cost of outsourcing our existing infrastructure to the university sector. It's interesting that, while we're debating this bill, we have many states bidding for the leadership of this nation's capacity in the space area, and yet we have this bill on astronomy reflecting an entirely different approach. When we debate this bill, we should not forget that Australian astronomy is world leading. We have some of the best skies in the world for astronomical observations, and our continent faces 25 per cent of space. Our expertise and positioning has resulted in key roles in global consortia, such as the Square Kilometre Array and the Giant Magellan Telescope projects.

The Department of Industry, Innovation and Science's website mentions that the Anglo-Australian Telescope has had a constant upgrade to its instrumentation, which has helped maintain the high level of standard it has operated at since its commissioning in 1974. The Anglo-Australian Telescope was constructed using traditional equatorial mounting in which one of its rotation axes is parallel to the earth's axis. The Anglo-Australian Telescope is recognised for its excellent optics, its mechanical stability and its precision computer control, and all of these things make it a world-class telescope.

The Anglo-Australian Telescope has so many significant achieve achievements, and it's worth the House thinking about these achievements. It has detected clouds near the surface of Venus through dense atmosphere. It has observed the spectacular explosion of the Supernova 1987A, the brightest supernova since the invention of the telescope four centuries earlier, giving astronomers unprecedented insight into the death of a star. It has discovered dwarf galaxies. It has made the first detection of an isolated brown dwarf star in our galaxy. For the House's information, I have no idea what an isolated brown dwarf star is, but I'm certain that our scientists needed to know about it. It has measured the ratios of visible and invisible mass in the universe. It has discovered streams of stars in our galaxy that are the remnants of dwarf galaxies that have been absorbed into our own.

We are inspired of course by the work of Professor Brian Schmidt, now Vice-Chancellor of the Australian National University and a joint winner of the 2011 Nobel Prize in Physics. Professor Schmidt's team's breakthrough-of-the-year discovery, that the universe's expansion is accelerating, has altered our understanding of the universe, reversed previously held beliefs that the universe's expansion is slowing and led to new fields of study.

So this bill only adds to the government's disinclination to support Australian science, the Department of Innovation, Industry and Science, and research. As we recall, in their very first budget they hacked into the funding, seeking to cut almost $900 million from science and research.

Labor will always stand up and fight for science and for its funding, and Labor is committed to lifting investment in research and development to three per cent of GDP by 2030. That is a national goal that Bill Shorten has stated at a number of Science meets Parliament dinners, and it reflects our commitment to science as a national endeavour.

We know that science is the bedrock of constant growth and excellence in our health care, agriculture, education, environment, energy and the creation of future jobs. The Anglo-Australian Telescope and the Australian Astronomical Observatory laboratories are still state of the art. They still represent an important national capacity that needs to be maintained. That is why the opposition reluctantly supports this bill. Without its passage, we won't see these facilities transferred to the university sector, and the result will be their closure in 2020.

It does tell you everything about how this government proceeds and how it undertakes these great national endeavours. And they are great national endeavours. This was, in fact, a commitment that was first brought about by the Fraser government. Whatever you thought about Prime Minister Fraser, he did believe that the nation should have the ability and capacity to lead in these very important areas. This government adopts a very different view about science. It adopts a very different view of national progress. That is a great pity. There's always talk about bipartisanship in this building, but these national endeavours used to genuinely, I think, find not just support but active interest on both sides of this House. For ministers, backbenchers and governments of all shapes and sizes, it wasn't a question of honouring the other side's achievements as much as it was of building on them. By all accounts, these capacities were debated for a decade before the Fraser government made the decision. They were opened in 1974 by the Whitlam government. So what you had was a situation where governments—and, dare I say it, generations of politicians on different sides—created, nurtured and built a national capacity. What we find from this government is a completely different approach. They find a national capacity, and they seek actually to offload it—though to very worthy institutions; the universities involved are very worthy. We would want them involved, in any event.

I think the question that faces the country in these sorts of bills is: are these the sorts of things that our national government should be leading, should be interested in, should be building on and should be endeavouring to make a truly and genuinely national capacity? You only get that if you have not just an opposition that's committed to science but a government that's committed to science—not just one generation of politicians that is committed to this capacity.