Science and Technology Australia President Sharath Sriram
National Press Club of Australia Speech
20 March 2024
I’m here to talk to you about Australia’s future.
To talk about why we urgently need deep and bold investment in ideas and innovation.
To talk about how to turn every dollar we invest into five dollars.
And to talk about the cost of failing to use our potential and the damage it will do to our future prosperity.
I want to acknowledge the Ngunnawal and Ngambri people, the traditional custodians of the land on which we meet and pay my respects to Elders both past and present and to all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people here today.
Scientists embody humanity’s timeless curiosity.
That inquisitiveness was shared by the original inhabitants of this land.
Tens of thousands of years ago Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people looked up to the night skies, down at the earth, and at the creatures around them, and asked essentially the same questions all of us are still asking: how does all this work and how do we thrive in harmony with one another and with nature?
We should recognise, celebrate, and build on the wealth of knowledge they have created.
We look further by standing on the shoulders of giants.
An Australian invention the polymer fifty-dollar note features David Ngunaitponi – more commonly known as David Unaipon.
I am an engineer and inventor, like him. I’ve long admired his brilliance and resilience.
In fact, he was considered by many as Australia’s Leonardo da Vinci.
He was a prolific inventor. He designed an Australian necessity the hand-held wool shearing tool.
It’s there on our fifty-dollar note.
The past and the present together.
These things we should always acknowledge.
Australians are inquisitive and inventive.
This room is full of the people discovering things and creating them building our country’s future.
There are teams working on …
improving health outcomes from making 3D-printed parts to replace damaged bones to understanding how to minimise complications for people with diabetes …
using Australian minerals to make the most advanced and safest batteries in the world …
designing and building micro-chips for the future of computing using light or atoms!
Imagine the possibilities!
How do we use these ideas to make our lives better? Our economy stronger? Our future secure?
One of them sums up our challenge as a nation.
We all love solar panels turning sunlight into clean energy.
Australians made this possible.
An award-winning team at the University of New South Wales – Professors Martin Green and Andrew Blakers, and Dr Aihua Wang and Dr Jianhua Zhao.
World leading science and technology.
About 8 out of every 10 solar panels in the world uses Australian technology.
All the research done here.
But all the development, commercialisation, and manufacturing done overseas.
Creating enormous companies, billionaires, and thousands upon thousands of jobs elsewhere.
This is just one example.
Cervical cancer vaccine implantable pacemakers WiFi Google Maps …
We can’t let it keep happening.
We can’t let history keep repeating.
Now, another group of Australian scientists and engineers are improving on solar cell technology at the University of Newcastle.
They are creating solar panels that are like sheets of plastic thinner than a chip packet.
They print them quickly and easily, like newspapers light, flexible, recyclable, and cheap.
We can cover buildings with these making them power generators clean and self-sufficient.
Such incredible ideas need to be turned into Australian products and Australian jobs.
We urgently need to retain our ideas our secret recipes our intellectual property.
If we continue to let opportunities slip through our hands, then history will judge us. Badly.
People often say these days Australia doesn’t seem to make things anymore.
Well, here is our chance.
We can create an advanced manufacturing sector that will diversify our economy …
We can create exports and we can provide highly-skilled jobs now and in the future …
But only by investing now and into the future to create an innovation ecosystem that works.
This is our task. Frankly, this is our responsibility.
As you can probably tell, I’m very passionate about this.
I know the hundreds of scientists gathered in Canberra this week for Science Meets Parliament share this passion.
As Julie said, I’m Sharath Sriram.
I am a Professor at RMIT University.
I am privileged to be the President of Science & Technology Australia.
We represent 225,000 scientists and technologists from 140 organisations.
All of them, passionate about the potential and promise of science.
All of them, 100 per cent determined to create a better future for all of us.
Everyone in STA is focused on that future.
There isn’t a person here today who isn’t itching to put their great ideas into practice to help our people and our planet.
Many already have.
Some help people hear and see better create medicines for the harshest illnesses and designed health practices that saved so many lives at the start of the pandemic.
Others are battling to save our beautiful marine ecosystems and farming land from the ravages of global heating and climate change.
My focus is using technology to give healthier and better lives to everyone. I’ve seen what research into new technologies can do to reduce pain and suffering and prolong life.
Like many other scientists here today, I’ve personally experienced what the failure to take advantage of opportunities means.
I came here from my country of birth India in the early 2000s.
At a time when Australia still had the chance to create a sizeable micro-chip industry.
This was the time of the IT boom!
Everyone I was growing up with wanted to learn to program computers.
I felt knowing how to build the computers that every programmer needs would set me apart and make me indispensable!
And computers are full of micro-chips. What are micro-chips?
The smartphone that we carry have an average of 12 billion transistors and thousands of other electronic components these are inside the small black squares you see in electronics.
The black squares are the micro-chips the secret sauce they contain all the ‘smarts’.
Every day, we rely on thousands of these in our phones and laptops, the fridge or microwave, the operation and safety of every single car, Bluetooth headphones, and much more.
In 1999 The Victorian State Government invested seven million dollars to purchase software that is used to design micro-chips.
Industry and universities came together and created a bespoke postgraduate program called ChipSkills.
It was a true partnership different universities offering courses they were the best at, in partnership with TAFEs for technical certification, and embedded industry internships with large electronics companies.
The companies were from Korea, Japan, and Germany.
They were investing in Australia as they saw talent, discoveries, and potential.
Starting with 30 students, it started attracting over 200 students a year.
I was one of these students.
Despite the interest from these electronics companies, the lack of mechanisms to commercialise ideas or build large facilities in Australia meant these international companies decided to exit Australia within the decade.
This was a massive, missed opportunity the consequences are still playing out today.
Micro-chips are at the heart of just about every advance our country is investing in – quantum computing, artificial intelligence, digital health, advanced manufacturing and clean energy.
NVIDIA is the world’s third most valuable company on the stock market its value has doubled in the last three months to over 2 trillion dollars because it makes micro-chips for AI.
OpenAI, which delivered ChatGPT, is trying to raise 7 trillion US dollars – that’s right, 7 trillion – to build micro-chip manufacturing capabilities to manage future needs.
Singapore last month committed 1 billion dollars over 5 years to secure supply of AI micro-chips.
And India approved four micro-chip manufacturing facilities in recent months.
This is what Australia has missed out on.
Imagine that we could have been making micro-chips here and supplying the world.
Many scientists around the country and that includes me have had to reinvent ourselves with every missed opportunity.
Often, we’ve had to pivot to other fields.
We may not make micro-chips here but we are finding inventive ways to use them.
That’s what I’ve done with the team I lead with Professor Madhu Bhaskaran at RMIT University.
I’ve helped companies transform their great ideas into incredible products developing medical technologies to identify illnesses and keep people healthier for longer.
I’ve helped these companies navigate barriers to accessing funding to understand the ecosystem to make their ideas come true.
How many of you have an elderly relative living alone? Or in a residential care facility?
It makes us anxious, especially overnight as they are at a high risk of falls and injuries.
A Melbourne-based company Sleeptite wanted to get rid of that anxiety.
Sleeptite had been searching the world for 5 years to make a smart bed for aged-care monitoring.
Founded by the husband-and-wife team of Cameron and Alison van den Dungen – Cam is here today – they wanted to unobtrusively monitor the well-being of an elderly person overnight.
In 2013 at RMIT we had created a new technology to make extremely soft and unbreakable electronics electronics on rubber, that do not break and repair themselves.
A chance meeting and in two and a half years, we went from concept to a product taking expensive micro-chip technology turning it into a simple printed technology like making T-shirts and iron-on labels.
A product that could be cost-competitive for use in aged-care facilities.
These rubber-based electronics became smart, medical-grade mattress covers.
No devices to wear, no devices to charge just a product that is near them a ‘nearable’.
As researchers, we’ve had to help Sleeptite navigate grant programs at every stage from the first one through to manufacturing grants and medical device grants.
Navigate a system which is mostly a mystery to industry.
For Sleeptite, we created special ink recipes for printing Sleeptite and RMIT’s secret sauce.
Unfortunately, we had to send this valuable secret sauce overseas to be able to manufacture prototypes as we do not have specialised prototyping facilities in the country risking valuable intellectual property and Australian investment.
My second example is Atmo Biosciences.
Atmo is making a world-first gas-sensing capsules that you swallow to provide insights into gut health.
Professor Kourosh Kalantar-zadeh and I were brainstorming with a PhD student, Majid Nour, on whether we could make ultra-thin membranes that could separate gases.
If we could separate hydrogen, we could make miniature fuel cells fuel cells that could potentially power phones from water vapour in the air.
Well, that failed. But, we learnt something we pivoted.
We found we could separate gases that are commonly found in our stomach.
Why does this matter?
I am sure you know someone with a digestive issue or it could be you.
Every stomach ailment or allergy is linked to the mixture of gases in our stomach.
Another PhD student, Kyle Berean, built on these findings to lead the development of a capsule to measure gases in one’s stomach.
That was a breakthrough except there was no money to make these smart capsules.
The main funding source for engineers, the Australian Research Council, does not fund medical research.
The National Health and Medical Research Council wouldn’t fund it because the technology needed further development.
This is a constant source of frustration to researchers.
The governing legislations are old and not suited to today’s world, where the boldest problems are solved by bringing disciplines together.
Call it luck or the resilience of scientists but eventually the project got funded.
And you would not believe it through the Department of Agriculture!
They saw its use in finding out what to feed cows, so that they expel lesser methane as our meat and livestock industry is a big contributor to atmospheric carbon.
The project succeeded the gas sensing capsules worked well in cows, and then sheep.
A Melbourne-based product development company, Planet Innovation, then licenced the technology from RMIT, to set up Atmo Biosciences.
The PhD student I mentioned, Kyle Berean, is now the Chief Technology Officer of Atmo Biosciences.
Atmo recently reached a very successful benchmark one thousand of their capsules have been successfully tested by people.
Australian ingenuity and persistence helping understand gut health.
The third example is a micro-chip that can rapidly screen for diseases. Using just a smartphone.
We designed this technology with a vision of one day having a smart toothbrush that measures your health from saliva.
We want to stop diseases before they happen as we all know, prevention is better than cure.
We asked ourselves, “Can we stop a heart attack before it happens?”
We know we can.
We are now using these sensors in technology for women’s health to detect preeclampsia, which can be a silent killer and to take the stress out of IVF, with a Melbourne-based start-up, SymexLabs.
Remember, micro-chips. This technology completely relies on them.
……
I use these examples because I have personally ridden their ups and downs.
Others in the audience today who are engaged in similar start-up businesses with enormous potential. They too have high hopes but are facing high hurdles.
I know what they’re going through.
Their great research and ideas and the products, services, and jobs they can create should never be at risk of falling over or being lost overseas.
But the necessary investment and systems to keep them progressing and keep them in Australia just isn’t there.
……
What’s really holding us back?
A lack of strategy and bold investment.
What all these stories highlight is the need for deep, long-term, and sustained funding.
Strategy with boldness so that Australia can nurture and benefit from the next wave of breakthroughs.
We cannot escape this fact our woefully low investment in R&D is holding our country back.
It’s leading to our best ideas going overseas to our international competitors.
When we give up our intellectual property, it’s never coming back. And we will pay more for the same products.
We need to realise that our IP is gold dust. And like small, shiny particles of gold dust, it will slip through our hands if we don’t grasp it tightly.
Ideas are precious. They are the source of future jobs and growth. They are our national inheritance.
We need the right processes and structures in place to keep them here and reap the benefits here.
So, what are we doing wrong?
The numbers tell the tale.
Australia’s spending on R&D as a percentage of GDP has been in decline for more than a decade.
We now spend just 1.68 per cent of GDP on R&D less than 2 cents in every dollar spent in Australia is on R&D.
This is well below the OECD average of 2.7 per cent and a country mile behind the top performers.
The United States spends more than double that amount 3.5 per cent of their GDP. South Korea spends almost triple the amount at 4.9 per cent.
Through COVID, countries realised the value of science and the crucial importance of sovereign capabilities.
Most countries ramped up investment dramatically.
Australia did not it fell further behind.
I have spoken of micro-chips. During COVID, we had critical shortages of micro-chips.
We could not build medical equipment, cars did not have parts, and projected wait-times on orders blew out to years 11 years and more.
The US responded with the CHIPS and Science Act 280 billion US dollars in new funding to boost domestic research and manufacturing of semiconductors.
We are failing to keep up with a tech-transforming world.
Harvard’s Atlas of Economic Complexity ranks Australia 93rd of 133 countries 93rd.
Would we accept being 93rd at the Olympics?
If it is unacceptable for sports, how is it acceptable for innovation?
And we’re going backwards. Ten years ago we were 81st. We’ve plunged 12 places.
Our economic competitors are learning, maturing, getting wealthier.
We are going in the opposite direction.
Damningly, The Atlas says that Australia hasn’t started the process of diversifying our economy.
We have not started structural transformation to develop higher-value industries.
We are still reliant on digging things and selling them.
This leaves us exposed to fluctuations in global commodity prices and at risk of being left behind as technology advances.
Surely, we can be smart enough to take the resources we have and make valuable products and to take the wealth from resources and turn them into long-term benefit.
We can create large future funds that invest in innovation fundamental research and translation.
Other countries can do this and so should we.
All this is quite an indictment. And a rather embarrassing one.
Our choices right now on how we support our ideas and our inventors is going to define Australia’s future wellbeing and prosperity.
To maintain our standard of living, Australia must increase R&D expenditure to 3 per cent of GDP as fast as we can.
That is how we will create the thriving innovation system that we need.
An innovation ecosystem that will transform our ideas and discoveries into products, services, and jobs.
If we were investing that 3 per cent of GDP in R&D right now, the economy would be $100 billion and 42,000 jobs better off.
I will say that again: 100 billion dollars better off with an additional 42,000 high-value jobs.
And this is a conservative estimate.
42,000 new jobs would transform Australia’s economy.
The people doing those jobs would be growing our economy, saving lives, and improving our wellbeing.
But they’re not there those jobs don’t exist those ideas have not become inventions.
That’s the cost of our current inaction.
I know some of you would be thinking “Can we afford this during a cost-of-living crunch?”
The economic benefits of R&D investment cannot be disputed.
For example, very early-stage research, funded by the Australian Research Council, returns $3.32 to the economy for every dollar invested.
Research further along the innovation pipeline, supported through the Cooperative Research Centres programs, have higher returns $5.61 for every dollar invested.
Would you say no to a three-fold or five-fold return on your investments or superannuation?
Right now, we are missing crucial investments in the development, commercialisation, and manufacturing pipeline.
Universities and research institutes are doing the heavy lifting in Australia’s R&D system doing a bigger share of research than in other comparable country or economy.
Their research is world-class and has real world applications.
But business needs to do more.
Australian business R&D expenditure is 0.89 per cent of GDP two and a half times lower than the US four times lower than in South Korea.
We need to get that figure up, significantly.
Neither business nor government can do everything on their own, though.
The three parts of our innovation ecosystem need to work in cohesion universities and research institutes generating ideas, businesses transforming and adopting them, with government championing the efforts with strategic incentives and driving efficiencies.
It will take the right investment incentives and, along with the additional dollars, and the right connected innovation ecosystem to bring it all together.
By connected innovation ecosystem I mean an end-to-end system for taking a great idea, creating a product or service from it …and finding multiple uses from that innovation to draw maximum value for society.
First, we have the actual idea and test to see if it works this is the vital discovery research that often happens at universities.
Next, we need to test how it can be used in different ways for different purposes.
Once we’ve developed proven applications, we need to take them to market.
This means user testing and manufacturing. It means having the skilled workers and facilities to build things. It means regulation to make sure our new ideas are safe and meet their purpose, and the new industries we build are sustainable.
Sadly, this ecosystem doesn’t fully exist.
The companies I mentioned earlier, Sleeptite and Atmo Biosciences, highlight that.
Having navigated these processes, I know that a smart country like ours can do better than that.
Creating this ecosystem is crucial. Failing to build it will have big consequences.
We simply must make Australia a country of innovation.
But, what if we don’t? What then?
We will need to face a new reality.
Our standing as one of the richer nations of the earth is not a given. Especially not now, as coal and gas lose their appeal and other nations overtake us on technology development.
If we fail to diversify if we don’t become an innovation-driven economy we will be a nation of consumers rather than creators.
We will end up paying an ever-increasing rent to the rest of the world.
Think of the health implications.
Medicines, medical technology, skilled medical specialists all will be far more expensive. And potentially harder to source in times of disruption.
With our rapidly growing and ageing population, we are soon going to need the equivalent of a billion-dollar hospital wing added to our medical system every week.
That is not realistic.
Technology can help keep us healthier and at home for longer prevention is always better than cure.
And think of what it means for our environment in the face of climate change.
Our environment is unique.
We will need unique solutions to save our rivers – already in huge trouble …
Our farming land – flooding one season, drought-affected the next …
And of course, the Great Barrier Reef another bleaching event recently.
The answers to our environmental problems won’t come from off-the-shelf they can’t be imported from elsewhere. We must find these solutions ourselves.
In today’s world, it’s more important to be a smart country than to be a lucky one.
There’s a lot at stake.
Our life expectancy. Our standard of living. Our national prestige. Our flora and fauna. Our national security.
But get it right, and it will create the brighter future we all want. A new era of opportunity.
Well, that’s the boldness and investment I wanted to talk to you about to turn our potential into prosperity.
We need Australian to invest 3 per cent of GDP in R&D as soon as possible.
Unless we become a smarter country, we’re doomed to become a poorer one.
A cynic would say that scientists and academics are bound to say things like this.
A cynic would say everyone asks for more money.
But this is bigger than that. This is not just spending money this is an investment.
It will save money and livelihoods and lives.
An investment to ensure our future prosperity.
I think this is a story that everyday Australians get.
They may not spend their days looking at graphs of R&D spending but they enjoy the benefits of the extraordinary leaps being made in technology – the acceleration of AI, the expansion of renewables, and the incredible breakthroughs being made in medical research.
And they see a country whose economic base is starting to look a little tired and old fashioned.
A country that is starting to fall behind.
One that needs the injection of new ideas and new sources of national income and jobs.
They want the ideas, the prosperity and the jobs – the security for our country – that will result.
And the scientists and technologists of Australia, many gathered here today, stand ready to help to create that brighter future.
Thank you.
