Science meets Parliament is an annual event organised by the Federation of Australian Scientific and Technological Societies (FASTS) where scientists from all over Australia converge on Canberra to learn about the political process and to talk to parliamentarians. This year I was given the chance to attend sponsored by the Staff Association.

Our first day was spent at the press club where we learnt about lobbying and the political world. Many of our speakers emphasised that the scientific facts that we work so hard to verify don’t have nearly as much weight as we might expect in the political decision-making process. As one of our speakers put it, to a politician facts are just a scientist’s opinion. Quite a bit of discussion followed about how to get the issues that scientist’s feel are important on the agenda. One strategy that emerged was to engage more directly with the public - as politicians are keen students of public opinion – this ties in well with the Staff Association’s Science and Society campaign.

Later we heard a speech from the new Minister, Julie Bishop. She emphasised the importance of science education for the future and used some rubbery figures to make Australia’s lacklustre national investment in science look better than it was. She also announced the appointment of Jim Peacock as Chief Scientist which generated quite a bit of interest.

The second day was dedicated to meeting parliamentarians. Most of us met two or three parliamentarians in groups of three assigned according to scientific background and the interests indicated by the MPs and Senators. Energy was the major area of interest this year, whereas global warming had been most popular last year (Bradley Smith of FASTS who organised the event speculated this was because the global warming debate was over and now MPs had moved on to what we could do about it).

I met Anthony Byrne (ALP member for Holt) together with Peter Ozvath (CSIRO and Royal Australian Chemistry Institute) and Melanie Reen who consults for companies in the area of spinoffs, getting grants for commercialisation etc. Mr Byrne was mainly interested in innovation and the discussion focussed on keeping technology in Australia. He was interested in specific examples where technology had gone overseas and we will be providing him with examples from our own experiences of this. The “sound bite” which did grab him in relation to innovation going offshore was when Peter said “do you want all our kids to be bus-boys and hotel staff in the future?” - eg as opposed to having employment opportunities in our own technology-based industries.

My other meeting was with Chris Stock, the staffer of Senator Fielding (Family First, Victoria) together with Suzy Jackson of ATNF and Tracy Cross of NHMRC. Issues he was interested in were water and frontier research. For the latter we talked about radio astronomy (Suzy’s field) and nanotechnology/molecular electronics. We also discussed at length the issue of scientists career path and the lack of job security at the point when people may have started a family/have a mortgage, and the loss of the investment of all that education/experience when people leave science (in search of better job security). The issue of childcare/career paths for female scientists also came up. He was very interested in the figures for science spend as a percentage of GDP. We mentioned how in her speech Julie Bishop talked about China hoping to increase R&D spend to 2.5% of GDP by 2015, and Europe aiming to reach 3% of GDP but that she failed to mention Australia was 1.6%(?) of GDP (Tracy Cross of NHMRC had this figure). Like Peter in the previous meeting, Suzy also talked about the future employment opportunities for our kids being confined to mining/tourism if we don’t support and keep a technology base in Australia.

Interspersed with the visits to parliamentarian were science forums. I attended the Energy Futures Forum but found it a little bland - there was no opportunity for questions from the floor, and the liberal and labour politicians on the panel were mostly in agreement on energy issues. I was interested to see how high nuclear power was on the agenda – there was a real buzz around this issue and while I don’t think any of the panel were completely decided, there was a view that nuclear power for Australia needs to be seriously considered.

Overall I found Science meet Parliament interesting and enjoyable and learned a lot – I just hope a little info seeped through in the other direction! It’s a valuable experience for any scientist, so do consider going if you can.

Sherry Mayo