Consultation body named

The Federal government has named the eight people who will help to set Australia's national research priorities.

The research priorities, to be announced later in the year, will be determined after consultation with industry, universities, research agencies and the general community.

Education, Science and Training Minister Dr Brendan Nelson said setting national priorities would allow Australia to better exploit its competitive advantages while achieving wider economic and social goals.

Headed by Chief Scientist Dr Robin Batterham, the eight-member consultative panel includes Dr Melissa Little, senior research fellow at the University of Queensland's Institute for Molecular Bioscience, and Prof Graham Farquhar, who heads the environmental biology group at the Research School of Biological Sciences, Australian National University.

The consultative panel also includes:

• Dr John Keniry, immediate past president of the Australian Chamber of Commerce & Industry,
• Stuart Bell, CRC for Greenhouse Accounting advisory council and CEO of Universal Carbon Exchange,
• Helmut Pekarek, chairman and MD of Siemens Australia and New Zealand,
• Prof Janice Burn, Foundation Professor of Information Systems at Edith Cowan University and a member of the ARC expert advisory panel on mathematics, information and communication sciences,
• Prof Chris Fell, president of the Federation of Australian Scientific and Technological Societies, and
• Prof Leon Mann, president of the Australian Academy of Social Sciences.

In a recent address to the National Press Club, Nelson said important issues that would shape the research sector included defining universities, attrition rates, government involvement, commercialising IP, university generalisation and setting priorities in research.

Two novel suggestions by the minister were that universities should commercialise their scientific research more to support humanities, and that universities should share resources so students could study at several different institutions for the one degree.

He said the chief scientist and the consultative panel would be asking research organisations and the public to decide their preferred priority areas.

Nelson said the national research priorities report would be ready by the end of June, and the consultative panel would report to government so that by the end of July the final framework for setting national priorities would be made public.

Any further recommendations will be accepted until early August and in September an advisory committee will submit the short-list of national research priorities to government, and the national research priorities will be announced in October.