We have to make every research dollar count if we want to solve our biggest problems |
A century ago, Australian science was at an inflection point. Australia was, said the then-prime minister Stanley Melbourne Bruce, a land of "splendid opportunities" as well as "difficult problems". What Australia needed was the best possible industrial science.
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Australia lacked the capital and weight that made American scientific and industrial development so successful. It also lacked the kind of strategic and institutional clarity its "sister dominions" had brought to their own public science sectors.
Bruce introduced a bill that turned the struggling Institute for Science and Industry into something more strategic, industrially connected and enduring: the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR). That meant better governance, a new endowment and a much clearer focus for its services in partnership with other scientists, the private sector, universities and international partners.
The new agency had a clear mission. Bruce said it would tackle urgent national priorities including food preservation and "cold storage" technologies, plant and animal diseases, and solutions to the "liquid fuel" dependency problem. It would not "do too much" or risk "duplication and the overlapping of effort". Instead, its mission was to make sure the best research was undertaken 'wherever the best facilities' resided.
For 100 years, Australia's national science agency has been delivering on that mission. CSIRO's scientific and technological breakthroughs are indispensable in our homes and workplaces.
CSIRO research is enabling AI for emergency response, transforming how we understand and respond to bushfires.
Through work with key partners in the Pilbara, work is under way towards iron production backed by renewables - which could grow the sector by over $250 billion in the coming........