New Zealand Association of Scientists slams “bankruptcy of ideas” in national review
A government report on New Zealand’s science and research priorities has been quietly released by the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment, prompting criticism from a national science group.
The report was commissioned in August by the former government, from an independent expert panel led by former governor-general Jerry Mateparae. It was intended to underpin the creation of new national priorities and the now-scrapped Te Ara Paerangi Future Pathways reforms.
Posted on the ministry’s website on 19 February, it identifies a suggested “focus” for New Zealand’s science, innovation and technology sector. “We need to make choices so that we do not spread our resources too thinly and can make impactful shifts in critical areas,” it says.
The panel looked for areas where New Zealand had “deep expertise”, where there were critical issues or opportunities and where it was important to keep up or “risk losing our status as an advanced nation”. Twelve areas of national “ambition” are listed, grouped into four areas: economic growth, competitiveness, health and environmental change. Areas of focus within these groupings include infrastructure, food production, land use, wellbeing, sustainable cities, natural hazard resilience, water health and ocean health.
“The panel is mindful that further engagement is needed to focus the ambitions and identify specific research questions,” the report says.
‘Bankruptcy of ideas’
Troy Baisden, co-president of the New Zealand Association of Scientists, told Research Professional News that the report showed that “Te Ara Paerangi ended in a bankruptcy of ideas presented as brief mission statements intended to justify meaningful increases in research funding”.
Baisden said that a title change for the panel, from ‘priorities’ to ‘strategic’, “underscores the confusion resulting from a vacuum of national strategy in the most important areas where concentrations of well-connected research are needed”, with some exceptions such as the centring of Plant and Food Research, a Crown Research Institute, in agricultural issues.
Baisden said that “climate change has always been the acid test for this process. The panel’s report was extraordinarily incoherent and disappointing on this particular subject.”
In response to questions from Research Professional News, the ministry sent a statement from Prue Williams, its general manager for future research systems, who had been in charge of implementing Future Pathways.
Judith Collins, who has been science minister since November, received the independent strategic panel’s report on 21 December, the statement said. “While the minister will not be taking Te Ara Paerangi Future Pathways forward, she has acknowledged the technical insights provided by the previous government’s independent strategic panel, which has ensured the ministry has a good and current understanding of the challenges and opportunities.”
But Baisden said that the report, which has had no public government response as yet, “leaves us not only with no progress on Te Ara Paerangi’s well-defined problems; it gives us no hint of solutions to the university funding crisis that has emerged in the years since Te Ara Paerangi got underway”.
The ministry did not respond to questions about further consultation with the sector, as recommended in the report.