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It's an absolute pleasure to have the Chief Scientist here with us today. He has a very
long and intimidating bio, there's a few subset of points in that bio, he was appointed as
the Chief Scientist of Australia in 2011 after a long and distinguished leadership career
in science and higher education. In 1999 he was made Officer of the Order of Australia
for service to the development of higher education policy and its implementation at a state,
national and international level, and in 2006 he was made a Companion of the Order of Australia
for service to higher education including research and development policy in the pursuit
of advancing the national interest. Professor Chubb has held a number of senior executive
positions at universities around Australia including being the Vice-Chancellor of Flinders
University for five years and the Australian National University for 10 years. Today Professor
Chubb will be talking to us about insuring Australia's science, technology, engineering
and mathematics future, so please join me in providing a warm welcome to Professor Chubb.
What I was pleased to do was to be invited to speak to you tonight as part of this push
on mathematics and bringing industry and the academic world closer together. It's a very
important thing that we do, we don't do it particularly well in Australia, and I will
indulge in a little bit of self-legislation as I go through my talk because it's easy
to be critical of what we do, so let me say at the beginning that we do a lot of things
really well, and there are a lot of things that we can be really proud of as a scientific,
as a STEM imbued country, there are a lot of things and we've had a lot of achievement
and a lot of individual achievements over the years. But what that's lead people to
talk about is how we punch above our weight, and one of the more aggravating things that
I've heard from people, from politicians through to self-indulgent scientists to people who
are not in touch with reality, that, you know, because we're point three percent of the world's
population and we produce three percent of the world's publications we punch above our
weight. Now when I was a young person that sounded pretty good to me, a while ago, and
I thought to myself "We're really good at this, we're really good at what we do and
we're so much better than anybody else because we punch so far above our weight.", but what
we forgot to do was ask ourselves the weight class in which we punch, because our ratio,
if you just take some of the developed countries of the world and you take those with a culture
that includes STEM, then that would put us about number 11 or 12 on that list. And I
could say to you "Is that good enough?", I could say to you "Should we be content with
that? Should we be content with what could be called a, sort of, small amount of self-delusion?".
Delusion is a word that features in the press fairly regularly recently but more attached
to climate change than other things, but should we be happy with that? Should we be willing
to say to ourselves that "We can say that we punch above our weight because if we ask
about the weight class then, you know, sure we do", but would we be happy to be number
11 behind the US, behind Canada, behind Britain, behind Switzerland, behind Denmark, Sweden
and so on, you name them and they're ahead of us, and why can't we be like them? What
are the things that they do that we don't? What are the things that they have as part
of their culture that we don't? How do we learn from those countries that perform better
than us, and how do we understand what we need to do, and do more than talk about it
when we do. Think about how we implement, think about how we work with each other, think
about how we all work together, say business and industry for example, instead of each
living in a glass house and throwing rocks at the other, when do we come to recognize
that in reality we are in this together and that we will turn the place into one better
than it presently is if we work together effectively. So the theme of my talk was the role of universities
in promoting and sustaining the STEM, science, technology, engineering and mathematics agenda,
and so the role of universities and business in promoting and sustaining the STEM agenda.
And I guess the first question to ask yourself when you're given that title is "Why would
they?", and I ask another question, I say to myself, as I've said to others around the
country in the past couple of years, "Can you think of any big problem that confronts
humankind where the solution to it, the mitigation of it, the adaptation to it, won't have STEM
discipline somewhere in that solution, mitigation or adaptation or management. I can't think
of too many. I can think of some that will be controversial, I can think of the sort
of present debate about climate change, for example, and the debate about that, but debate
about those complex issues is quite healthy as long as we keep it simple, and that's an
example of where we don't always keep it simple but when we do that debate is healthy. Science
prospers when people with slightly different opinions, confronted with the same evidence,
can argue the toss and can try to nut out why they do have a different perspective.
Why do I see a sheet of results and think differently about it from that person there?
And surely the best outcome is that you debate it, you consider it, you go and make more
rigorous or different observations, whatever it might be, and you come to a conclusion;
might still be different, but the process has taken our knowledge and our understanding
a step further, a step beyond where it was before we started. So I can't think of any
big problems, there are probably some, but I can't think of any really big problems that
confront humanity that won't have the disciplines that we represent in STEM somewhere, sometimes
so obviously, sometimes more subtly at the core of the solution to some of those things.
I think that we would promote and sustain a STEM agenda in Australia because of what's
happening internationally. One of the striking characteristics about Australian STEM is that
it's relatively un-strategic; we have not, as a nation, sat back in any serious way and
thought through how is it that we maintain and sustain key disciplines that are critical
to the understanding and the solutions that I referred to earlier when they're not popular
for the moment. And we haven't worked that out, because we fund, for example, our universities
on the basis of the students they enrol and where they enrol them, and I know it's a democracy
and I know that you can't direct student something (8:23) who got 99 to go and do engineering
because you feel like it, and you think it would be good for him or her, I know we can't
do that but the alternative approach that we've taken is to do almost nothing. So there's
a constant lament at the moment about teacher education and the quality of the students
going into teacher education, different debate, you can ask be about that in Q&A, but there's
a constant commentary about that. So if it's true, how do we get students whose lights
are switched on by the STEM disciplines, who get high, top-decile scores, and how do you
get them to want to do teacher education, for example? And you can't just leave it and
say "Oh well, you know, they'll do it if they feel like it". We've been doing that for a
long time so in 2010 the median cut-off score for entry into science in Australian universities
was about 92, and the median intake for the education scores, ATARs I'm talking about,
was about 70, that's probably gone down now if we look at what's happening around the
sector with the caps taken off load, but in the top decile you had something like, obviously
with science a tad more than 50 percent of the incoming students, in education it was
about nought point one percent in the top decile. So why would we just let that happen?
Why wouldn't we find a way, consistent with democratic principles and processes, to tell
students what's in their interests? Because it's in the national interest that we do something
about it. So finding the right way with the right mix of incentives with the right and
appropriate mix of incentives so you don't have to say to people "We're not going to
let you do that because we want you to do this", but you are going to say to people
"Yeah, you want to do that, that's really good", and that's important, that's important
for the country. And that's what's happening internationally. Most of you in this room,
some of you will be much more knowledgeable about this than I, but when I started in this
job after quite a long time I always used to think of the United States as the land
of the totally free, where you could do anything that you wanted to do, I'm talking about teaching
and research, you can do anything that you wanted to do and then I discovered that in
fact they are very strategic. That for something to the order of 40 years they've had research
priorities which direct some of the funding of government, federal government, into areas
that are deemed to be more important than other areas right now. They don't do it for
everything, they don't do it with all the money, they just say that a proportion of
each federal government department and agency spend has to be spent in the areas, consistent
with their mission, has to be spent in the areas that are simply, right now, more important
than others, and we've never done that. We had national research priorities which, I'm
sure everyone who conducts research in this room has been able to tick a box and say "I
work in a national research priority area", and then we did a review of them and the review
increased the number because there were a few disgruntled people in some discipline
or other who didn't think they could tick a box, and they thought it was important that
the box be ticked. I don't know why it was important for the box to be ticked because
it had no impact on anything, not on any real decisions, not on any real processes, not
on the way we handle things, just they decided "Oh you know we've got 1500 people who work
on brick wall construction". Well, that might have made them happy, it might have made somebody
happy somewhere, but I don't think it was useful and I don't think that's what's happening
internationally. So a lot of those countries that I referred
to earlier that are above us in the three percent and point three percent table actually
has strategic approaches to STEM. They do things. They're not gross, they're not belligerently
or hostilely directive, they do things, and they work out things like how do you maintain
some disciplines when they're not popular, they work out things like what is a reasonable
balance of investment in different areas of research. They all, every one of them, allows
for bottom-up funding for research and good ideas, as do the Americans. A fair chunk of
their money is bottom-up driven, but a fair chunk of what is in the priorities is also
basic research, so they haven't swallowed this silly pill that every research thing,
person, project has to have an outcome that is translation, or of direct use, to industry,
they don't do that. In the United States in 1996, Bill Clinton was President, the captains
of American industry, the big corporations, wrote an open letter and they said to, reminded
Clinton publicly, that the government's job was to put in the patient capital for research
because the patient capital would lead to an environment where they felt that they could
creatively take risk, and the knowledge flow was coming through, there was support for
the knowledge flow coming through, some in priority areas, and the companies then picked
it up and took it further often in conjunction with the universities.
So there are a lot of things happening internationally and if we don't have a STEM and a STEM agenda
in Australia then we'll get left behind, and I don't want to get left behind, and I don't
want to hand on a country to young people that's actually happy to be left behind, happy
to punch above our weight and not ask what weight class are we punching in. I don't think
we can afford to do that. So there's a view around that we can just import what we need,
we only produce three percent of the world's publications so that means 97 percent are
produced elsewhere, so why don't we just sort of go and pick it off the shelf when we feel
like it, some people have done it, let somebody else's tax payer pay for the knowledge that's
on the shelf that we can go and pick off and use when we feel like it, and I would say
that that's a mendicant mentality, and I would say that Australia has been there and it should
have learned its lesson from been there. And as Troy said I spent 11 years at the ANU and
I love it, I think it's a great institution and I enjoyed nearly every day there as Vice-Chancellor,
I didn't retire from it loving every single person who was a member of the ANU but I do
love the institution, and in 1946 when I went there as Vice-Chancellor I had a look at the
history of the ANU, how did it come to be, what it was, an object of envy for most of
the Australian academic system including me when I was in other universities, and it was
quite interesting to read the history because part of post-war reconstruction the bureaucrats
at the time resolved that never again would Australia be in the position where it did
not have the capacity to contribute to the world stock of knowledge, it was not going
to put the country back into that position. And at that time it was not an expectation
that Australian universities would do research, so there was a bit of research done in CSIRO,
the odd, very small medical research institute and a few bits and pieces in the Australian
university sector at the time, but there was no expectation. As my friend and colleague
from the University of Melbourne, Glyn Davis, once said "From 1946 where we had one university
that was expected to do research, and that was the ANU, we've now moved to a position
where every university is expected to do research". You can't be called a university if you're
not doing research in a small number of subjects, three. And I think it was really important
that we learned from that history, we learned during that period of 1939 to 1945 that we
could not depend on those upon whom we had depended for a long time, we could not depend
on them to tell us what we needed to know, in this country, in this place, in this geographic
region, we did not understand it and we had very limited capacity to do anything about
it. And so they set up the ANU, and of course eventually the Australian research effort
has grown very substantially, it's grown very significantly to the point where now we produce
three percent of the world's population off nought point three percent of the world's,
eh, three percent of the world's publications, research publications, off point three percent
of the world's population. So it's a really big shift for us is a relatively short period
of time, and I think that's good and I think that we must never again allow ourselves to
be put in the position where people who just want to cut budgets, particularly within bureaucracies,
just think "Oh well, we'll just take it off the shelf if we need it assuming that even
if we could do that and we thought that was a wise thing to do we would have the capacity,
the talent, the skills available within this country to adapt it to what we needed in Australia,
and I'll put it to you that we would not be able to take that for granted.
So I think we've got to, universities and industry together, promote and sustain the
STEM agenda. So what is the STEM agenda? Well I think it starts out with recognizing that
all the elements need to fit together, and I'm talking primarily at primary school where
something under three percent of teaching time in Australian primary schools, something
under three percent is spent teaching science. And there was a speech given a year or a year
and a half ago by somebody who was an official in the primary school principals association
who thought there was too much emphasis on science, and so we have less than three percent.
We have about nine percent of time is spent on mathematics, but still our students performance
in mathematics, not the relative performance, the actual performance in these international
testing scales is going down, so it sort of begs the question, it's not just a matter
of time that you put in, it's the question of the quality of the time that you put in,
and it goes back to what I was saying earlier about teachers and teaching education, I'll
come onto that in a minute. It goes to secondary schools, so I've talked
to a lot, I've talked to a lot of teachers and I'm a great fan of teachers, I think they
hold the future of this country in their hands, I don't think we give them enough respect
and enough support as a community, and we should do a lot more to help teachers do the
job that we want them to do, and there's a lot of investment, both time, energy and probably
money, that needs to go into that. But I also know, anecdotes, I know, but doesn't matter
how good you fire up a primary school student, because don't forget in primary schools they
have specialist music teachers, specialist this and that but they don't have any specialist
science teachers except for in very rare and very few places, but even when they do it
doesn't matter how fired up they are when they go into secondary school if they, in
certain sectors of the secondary school system, I'm told, that they are likely to get taught
science by the phys ed teacher with a *** knee, because the principals think "Well there
must have been some science in your course, so you go and teach", and of course the people
are not so confident in the topic they're teaching or the content they have to cover,
and so the lights begin to get switched off. By the time we get to, and we've all seen
the graphs with the declines in enrolments, with the shift from advanced maths to the
third level maths, you know, advanced, intermediate and whatever the third one is called, I've
forgotten the name, anyway, basic I suppose, well more basic. So we've seen that shift
in enrolment. We've seen all these things happening and we wring our hands and say "How
do we get better at that?". Well there are things that you can do, there are things that
you can do to support the teachers when they're actually trying to teach, you can support
the teachers by giving them good in-service training and support, you can give them help
by giving them good pre-service training and support, and trying to attract people who
want to be teachers, and who want to be science teachers, into science education. We've got
to remember that in September of last year there were students making study choices for
Year 11 and 12 all around Australia, and if they go to university then they'll come out
in about 2020, and they are influencing the skill profile of this country, and we're just
saying "Oh, let it happen", so they all want to do economics, for some reason. So we've
got a lot of people coming out with economics, or we may well have, or whatever it is, I
only pick on economics because it's early in the alphabet. They do this, they're making
those choices and when you aggregate them over a long period of time where you've got
all these people making their choices at the end of Year 10 that set them up in a way that's
completely different and we lament skills gaps in our profile, we lament the fact that
we can't get enough of these, or enough of those, and the assumption is that we'll be
able to import these people, just like we did when we wanted to build big infrastructure
30, 40 years ago. And the market for talent and skills is a lot hotter than it's been
for a long time, and it'll get hotter before it finishes, so we've got to do it ourselves
to help ourselves. And then there's tertiary and post-secondary teaching and research.
So, we need to teach better, I don't have any doubt about that. You could well ask me,
as a Vice-Chancellor, was the ANU the best teaching university in Australia? Happily
I could say it was, when I was there. I don't know whether the same whip, I once got a present
of a big whip and it was a bequest, I was bequeathed a whip, and I think I used it but
I didn't, a was very conservative and coaxed and cajoled, but we tried hard, and we probably
were, you know, if you look at the metrics we had done very well, that's not the point
I'm making, the point I'm really making is collectively we have to teach better and that
goes throughout schools and throughout universities. We know the old story that we teach in our
image, that we spend a lot of time doing to others what was done unto us, it's certainly
true for most PhD students, most PhD candidates in the country still, and they're the sorts
of things that I think we have to change. But importantly, and one of the things that
I think we do need to get on top of, is that we have to highlight the process of learning
while we deliver the content. Now you could be totally atheistic about that and say that
in a true education the content should be primarily designed to deliver the process
of learning, and you've got to have a vehicle or carry. I'm not going to be that bad, I'm
going to say people who want to learn physics, learn physics, but as part of that, and overtly,
they should be taken through the processes that you go through as you think about physics,
you think about evidence, you think about asking questions, you think about challenging,
you think about robust debate about what things mean and you take it from a different perspective
about how you learn, why you learn and your learning content at the same time. And one
of the reasons why I think we need to do that is that we have to educate and prepare people
for career options. When I was young, you did a PhD, you expected an academic job. I
had my first academic job halfway through my first postdoc, and I talk to young people
now who are onto their third or fourth postdoc with no real prospects of going beyond that
because they're being back filled, there's another bunch of young people graduating the
year them, the year after that and the year after that, and you feel, I feel, personally,
very affected by the fact that there are people who, in some respects, have just misread the
signals and the signs. Why would it be that you could expect a job to continue to do the
research you did your PhD in. Getting a PhD is not an entitlement to do the research you
want to do, funded by the taxpayer, for the rest of your life. It's not an entitlement,
never was, but it was more so in my youth than it is today. So we've got to prepare
people for what they're going into. The science enrolments over the last four or five years
have gone up fairly significantly. They were very flat for a long time, they introduced
the HECS discount, they started to go up, they cut off the HECS discount, they still
went up, last year was the last year of the HECS discount but they're still going up.
There was a bloke who wrote in The Age that he could understand why civil engineering
was going up because there was a resources boom, but he couldn't understand why science
was going up because there was on market signal, and you think to yourself "Do these guys live
on another planet?", you know, people actually sometimes do things they like, and the people
want to do some things sometimes, and they're not sitting back saying "Now I wonder precisely
what sort of job I might get", but as they go through the course they begin to think
about these things and we need to make sure that we prepare people through the process
of education, that we prepare them for options when they've completed it, they'll not just
anticipate that of the 60 thousand higher degree research students registered in Australia
at the moment, 60 thousand, will we have an academic staff compliment in our university
sector of about 40 thousand, and out in the agencies it might get up to 50, 55 thousand,
so in one year enrolment (28:11) we've got enough, we're graduating with a rate of 12
thousand a year and their future is not going to be the future that they might once have
thought but it can still be really good, it can still be really interesting, and they'd
make an enormously positive difference if they were STEM educated, it would make an
enormously positive difference to our finance system and our banking systems, and we've
just got to try to persuade, as I said at the beginning, we're all in this together,
how do we get the people with the right skills prepared for the right place. And we need
to be realistic about our research; we've got to think about our performance, we've
got to think about its international connectedness, we've got to worry about the quality versus
quantity, the number of publications out of Australia has increased quite substantially
over the last three or four years because all of the incentives are for numbers of publications,
but eighteen percent are never cited once, not even, well, probably by the author but
not by anybody else. We have a long tail in terms of if you just look at citation metrics,
and some of our best are the equal of the best anywhere but we've got a long tail than
many and I suggest that's partly because we've got the wrong incentives in place. We've got
to recognize that we've got to do better with industry; we've not done well, traditionally,
but industry's not done much very well either in lots of ways and so, as I said earlier,
we sit in our glass houses and throw stones at each other, and tell us what's wrong with
the other glass house, sooner or later we're going to get some common ground in the middle
and work out how to work together to get the right balance. I would not be one who proposes
that federally-funded, publically-funded research in our universities and research agencies
is simply a way of subsidising the R&D that industries want done but aren't prepared to
pay the full cost of, that's not what it's for. What it is for, I think, is to help get
the ideas that are emerging from research all around the world, focused in ways and
on issues where we can actually help Australian companies to be much more innovative than
they've ever been. We've spent 13.8 billion dollars on the tax incentive scheme in the
last decade, it's more than a decade old, but we spent 13.8 billion and four percent
of Australian companies innovate in order to take new products and services to international
markets. Four percent. It's a bit like the three and point three, should we be happy
with four percent? Another four percent take new products and services to the domestic
market, and 65 odd percent keep their innovations within the company. Now of course business
practices should be innovative and we should innovate as we go so I'm not arguing against
that, all I'm simply saying is the proportion 65, four and four have got to be wrong. How
do we go about making sure that we change that? And I think that again means that we've
got to get into the space between the glass houses. And that means we've got to understand
the cultural differences between business and education sector and especially universities.
It is inconceivable that we can prepare jobs for a particular market. I know there are
people who say "Science graduates, you know, there's no market pull". What market pull
are we talking about? The market that prevailed at the end of Year 10 when they made their
study choices, and took them down a path they couldn't get off? Are we talking about the
market that will be six years out from that decision making point? Are we talking about
the market four or five years after that when they've got some work experience under their
belt? Which one are we talking about? So I argue that what we've got to talk about is
teaching good physics, because it's the quality of the discipline that's important, we teach
them good educational process and we open up the minds to opportunities across a range
of occupations where collectively, by sitting in the space between the glass houses, we
can ensure that the world knows, to coin a phrase at the moment, that we are actually
open for business, we are actually doing things that will try to make a difference to this
country, and we do have to accept the fact that there are differences. Universities are
not wrong to take some time to pursue a question, they are not wrong to say "Professor X can't
do that for you this afternoon because Professor X is teaching a class of eager and enthusiastic
19-year-old people that want to learn from Professor X", they're not wrong to say that.
They are wrong when they assume that you can take forever to do anything. It's about balance,
and I'm going to end up on balance, but it's about balance, getting all of the elements
right, in the right place, to make to make sure that we support each other in the right
way. I would also argue that we need to stop complaining about things, we spend a lot of
time, I think, if I were 20 again and I was going to do a research project in, say for
example economics, unlikely as that might be, I would actually be interested in things
like hasn't the Australian culture changed from one where a few decades we got up and
did things, to now where we sit back and complain about things, with a few notable exceptions
to that of course. And I think if I look around me when I'm not in this room, then I see a
community that's become too fond of complaining about why things aren't better or why somebody
else should do their job better and not actually getting up and doing something about it. So
we hold endless conferences, endless reviews, endless bits of this or that and when it comes
time to put the rubber on the road, if it ever gets on the road, the tread is gone.
So we've got to stop doing that, and I'm talking about business as well as universities in
that. I think that we need to promote the future needs of STEM skills. There is a report
from the United States that says 80 percent of the jobs by 2020 will require STEM skills
by contrast to something of the order of 30 percent today, so they did something, they
declared that they were going to produce one million more graduates from the universities
and colleges by 2020, or over the decade, 2010 to 2020. They put money into schools
to enhance the education level at school and they put incentives in place to get the universities
to take them on. They don't know if they will be able to do that, because getting the entire
university system to move in unison is a trick that nobody's ever really got to the bottom
of but at least with the right signposts in place and the right incentives in place, things
can happen so it's something something (35:50) 30 percent increase in people with STEM skills
because that's what they believe they're going to need as they head off into the future,
and as Obama once said "The countries that out-educate us today will out-perform us tomorrow",
so you've got the sense of urgency. I was used the word torpor in a speech which got
a headline, but I think that's what we're in and we can't afford to be, and the rest
of the world will sail off without us and we won't even be able to pilot off the shelf
because we won't have the talent and skills to recognize what we need. So above all, and
let me finish on balance, we need to strike a balance, it's pretty easy to be critical,
it's pretty easy to take cheap shots like I've been doing. As I said at the beginning
we do some things really very well indeed, and we've got to keep those. Some of our university
traditions are actually worth keeping, and just because it's 2014 and not 1983, we shouldn't
just toss them out because that's when the statute, or whatever it was, was introduced
and has been built on over the years, we should be analytical, we should be careful but we
should be willing to be decisive. And I think it is about keeping the good, keeping the
beneficial, keeping the things that we know that work and keeping the things that actually
make education education, and not something that you could do if you lost your cerebral
cortex and just worked from the brainstem down. That's not what we're about, we're actually
about building this bit as well as making them work, and I think that keeping how we
do that and respecting how we do that is an important part, then we've got to change the
rest. So I said earlier today, when I first went to ANU in 2001 ANU had a PhD statute,
and early on somewhere in that statute it said that they had to be on campus 48 weeks
a year for the entire duration of the candidacy, so I said that's got to go, got to go, well
that's what Oxford did. In 1406, Oxford had a rule that said you had to live within a
couple of kilometres of the something (38:10). So we got rid of it, which meant that you
could actually send your students off to other countries, the only ones who ever went anywhere
were the anthropologists who needed to go to Indonesia or wherever and they had to extend
the something (38:27) so they spent the requisite amount of time on campus, so you could breathe
this air, you know, there's this imaginary wall around the campus and the air inside
is different from the air outside so you came out thinking differently if you spent enough
time there, and it didn't really work like that. When I went there we had something like
six hundred PhD students as I recall, when I left there were 26 hundred PhD students,
in part because it didn't pay enough attention to the coming generations, but in part because
the sort of restrictions of the degree rules and it was really difficult to get people
in interesting areas, and so you put it all together and there were a very small number
and we had to change that. So that's an example of changing some of the rest, when it doesn't
make sense to keep it, but the way that we went about supervising the students when we
got them we would not change because it was actually quite good.
We've got to engage with business differently, we talk about businesses as if it's homogeneous
and it's not, we've just done a survey of employers and for all of the complaints about
the education producing the people, 1100 people started the 20 minute questionnaire and 500
people finished the questionnaire, so it peters out about and we don't have a real hard fix
on what they said and the results are being calculated now, but one of the things that
was clear is that the big end of town has little difficulty engaging with and interacting
with universities, but the small end of town, which is the overwhelming chunk of our economy,
has great difficulty. And one of the temptations as a Vice-Chancellor is to engage with the
big end because it's got more money, when in fact in terms of the benefit to the economy
you might be much better off investing some of your own money into trying to engage with
the small to medium enterprises in your vicinity or whose interests align with yours wherever
they happen to be. So we've got to think about business not as a homogeneous entity but as
entities, large and small, all of which have needs and those needs need to be handled,
and the relationships need to be handled differently. But above all, ladies and gentleman, we need
to be unrelenting. If we give up on this one, if we think it's too easy, too hard, somebody
else's job, whatever it is, it's not going to work. We have to be unrelenting, we've
got to pursue a STEM agenda, we've got to do it, business, universities, schools, the
education system, we've got to do it together because if ever there was a national interest
where we could come together if we tried, it's this one. The importance of the underpinning
disciplines, the physics, the chemistry, the mathematics, the statistics, the biology,
the underpinning disciplines, that will allow us to look at a future that would be much,
much rosier than it would otherwise be if we ignored them. And it's not one voice that's
going to make a difference, it's a lot of voices and it's a lot of sectors, so I urge
you all to pick up the something (41:36), be unrelenting and be strategic about how
you go about it. Don't say to a government "We need more money", you can hear their eyes
roll from here; if you say "If we had more money, we could do this and this is the reason
why this would be a good thing to do, you're talking a different sort of turkey". So we
really need to think about how we make some of those interactions work, but we've got
to do it and it's got to be unrelenting because the alternative is too horrible to contemplate.
Thank you.