Image: Orlen Crawford for Research Professional News; Source: New Zealand National Party [CC BY-SA 4.0], via Wikimedia Commons
Harnessing research for economic growth is the top priority for New Zealand’s science minister
Judith Collins, New Zealand’s minister for science, innovation and technology, has long made it clear what she believes the country’s research sector is missing.
During last year’s election campaign, the National Party MP’s pitch on science and technology was for a far greater focus on commercialisation of scientific discoveries.
Since becoming a minister in late November, Collins has doubled down. Her stance on commercialisation is the motivation for shelving a major reform programme for New Zealand’s research system, launched by the previous government.
“If I could change the paradigm, it would be to understand that science…is utterly crucial to growing the New Zealand economy, just as it always has been,” Collins tells Research Professional News.
The minister was speaking to RPN on her way to Belgium, after having attended a meeting of science ministers from countries in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development in Paris this week.
According to the latest available figures, New Zealand spends around half the OECD average on R&D as a percentage of GDP. In 2021, New Zealand spent 1.45 per cent compared with the OECD average of 2.72 per cent—figures that include spending across the economy, so by government, business, higher education and non-profit organisations.
Does Collins have plans to increase this? “Eventually, yes, but at the moment we’ve got our first budget coming up as a government,” she says.
While she acknowledges the need to invest more as a country in R&D, she links this back to her anchoring argument. “What I’m seeing in a country of our size is that we have an enormous amount of research going on…the issue is how are we commercialising it.”
“Whether it comes from government, or whether it comes from the private sector, I’m quite agnostic about that.”
“But basically we need to make money, so that’s really where I’m focusing,” she says, noting that the government expects “more of a role for the private sector” in research funding and is looking for international investment in New Zealand science and technology.
‘Startup nation’
For a small country, geographically distant from global centres of R&D, New Zealand must play to its strengths when it comes to international cooperation.
Collins says there are “enormous opportunities” from membership of the EU’s Horizon Europe research and innovation programme, which was brokered under the previous government, and characterises New Zealand as “very much a startup nation” in certain technology areas.
Space is one area she is most enthusiastic about. “We have some amazing people, particularly in the space sector, which is way above what you’d expect from the nation of our population, but which had us as the country, for example, with the fourth most prolific launcher of rockets in the world last year.”
Only the United States, China and Russia launched more. Collins says people are “just amazed by that” but flags good reasons for New Zealand to be a player in the space sector, including clear skies and being in a different time zone and season to many other rocket launch sites.
“We have slightly different ways of doing things and we are also able to, I think, draw on connections all over the world because we’re a country that’s consistently looking outwards,” she adds.
Along with the science brief, Collins has space, defence, digitising government and other areas in her wide ministerial portfolio. At the OECD ministerial meeting in Paris, she says that the big focus was on artificial intelligence.
While in opposition, Collins set up a cross-party group looking at the dangers and the opportunities of AI. “Now [that] I’m the minister who has responsibility for the introduction of AI in a framework for its use in government, it’s something that I’m continuing to do…I’m trying to take the politics out of AI and use it a little bit like the combustion engine to change the way we think, and what we expect from government,” she says.
Reforms replaced
On other topics, she is much more political. Collins confirmed earlier this year that she was scrapping the Te Ara Paerangi Future Pathways reform programme. Developed under the previous government, the programme would have overhauled government research funding in New Zealand.
“I said very clearly to the previous government when we were in opposition [that] it was done without any consultation with other parties; it was not something we could possibly sign up to,” Collins says.
“When I saw the Future Pathways document, when it was finally released last year, there was almost nothing in there about commercialisation, and there was nothing in there about biotech.”
She adds that the plan contained “no real commitment” around AI, and no mention of a long-running moratorium on using genetic techniques outside the lab—something the new government has promised to end.
There is “legislation due by the end of the year to enable gene technology in New Zealand so that we are not being held back, and we are letting our scientists get on and do the best that they can”, she says.
In place of the Future Pathways programme, Collins has appointed an international science advisory group to advise the New Zealand government science reforms, chaired by former chief scientific adviser Peter Gluckman.
The minister says the group will have a “deep focus on commercialisation and how we can actually do that better” and she has asked Gluckman to consider emerging technologies.
“We’re moving quite quickly,” she says. “Sir Peter has committed to having the first report to us in the next couple of months, and then another report by probably October or November this year.”
Doing things differently
“We know what needs to get done, and I think the big thing is [that] there’s got to be a change of focus,” she says, highlighting how New Zealand’s strong agriculture and horticulture sectors are based on science and research.
“We just need to make sure that we start thinking like that again and start doing some things a bit differently.”
New Zealand’s 11 National Science Challenges set in 2014 will come to an end this year and Collins is lukewarm about the value of such long-term programmes. They “haven’t brought about some of the changes we would have hoped for”, she says. “I just think we need to be much quicker to change, and much more light on our feet.”
With only limited academic positions available at New Zealand’s eight universities, and job cuts at Crown Research Institutes, does she worry that the country could lose research talent?
“There will be some scientists who will leave, [and] there will be many other scientists who will come to New Zealand. We’re seeing that in the space sector, for instance, which 10 years ago wasn’t even on the radar and now it’s quite a fast-growing sector of the economy.”
Collins is optimistic that her vision for a more commercialised science sector will act as a magnet for researchers. “People will come and go—I think we’re going to get a lot more coming to be with us.”