ARC 25 year anniversary address, Shine Dome, Canberra
Can I acknowledge the Traditional Owners of the land we’re meeting on today.
And can I also acknowledge Peter, Ute, everyone at the ARC and all the incredible people in the room.
Happy 25th anniversary.
On Sunday another Australian institution celebrated the same milestone.
It started in July 2001, same month as the ARC.
The ABC Sunday morning political show Insiders.
To mark it, David Speers, his predecessor Barrie Cassidy and a panel took a look back at the last quarter of a century.
For someone who was a member of the previous Labor Government, there are still a few scars from the time.
But what struck me was how hard it is to see what’s coming, what the future has in store.
As Yogi Berra said, “It's tough to make predictions, especially about the future.”
If you had sat on the Insiders couch in 2001 and tried to describe the next 25 years, I’m not sure anyone would have believed you.
Seven different Prime Ministers.
A global financial crisis and a global pandemic.
A news cycle measured in days that’s now measured in minutes.
And all delivered via an infinite scroll on a screen, not from a paper on our doorstep in the morning.
These sorts of changes, in politics and the media, were part of a bigger change across society.
In 2001, social media didn’t exist.
Neither did the iPhone.
ChatGPT was decades away.
We were still emerging from what some called the “AI winter”.
Our society has been transformed by technological change that was hard to foresee.
That’s why there is something remarkable in looking at the research the ARC was backing then.
While no one could have seen everything that was coming, Australian researchers were already working on pieces of it.
In 2002, the ARC backed researchers at Monash using machine learning to work out how computers could interpret the questions people asked and generate answers from the enormous amount of information online.
Sound familiar?
That same year, researchers at the University of Sydney were working on mobile networks that could carry large amounts of data, not just our voices.
And researchers at UNSW were working on a project they called the “Provision of Arbitrary Complex Services on the Mobile Internet”.
What we just call apps today.
And in those early years, the ARC was also backing Australian researchers trying to build a quantum computer.
A field where 25 years later we are now a world leader.
The ARC became a statutory agency in 2001.
But what we are celebrating here isn’t an Act of Parliament.
It is the thousands and thousands of ideas the ARC backed.
And the brains behind them.
Some have helped us understand disease.
Some have helped us make energy cleaner and cheaper.
Some have helped us understand our environment.
Our history.
Some have helped us understand ourselves.
All have taken us somewhere new.
That’s what research does.
You don’t know the answer before you start.
Where the data will take you.
What the experiment will show you.
Which novel idea will bend conventional wisdom.
History tells us that the path from basic research to practical application isn’t always straight or easy to see.
You know this.
Australian research that once seemed highly theoretical made Wi-Fi possible.
Decades of work on solar technology helped make cheap renewable energy possible.
Research into quantum computing that once seemed the stuff of science fiction is now real.
None of these things appeared fully formed.
We don’t necessarily know where research will lead.
That’s why the ARC is important.
The role of the ARC is to give our best researchers the opportunity to follow their best ideas.
And that requires something else. Trust.
Trust in researchers. Trust in peer review. Trust in the institutions we establish to make these decisions.
And over the years, that trust had been damaged.
Before we came to Government, the ARC was bedevilled by political interference.
That wasn’t good for our universities. It wasn’t good for businesses who work with our universities either.
That’s why we changed the law.
We strengthened the independence of the ARC.
Politicians should not decide which physicist, historian or mathematician has written the better research proposal.
Research excellence should be judged by people who understand the research.
We are continuing to strengthen the ARC.
Last month we announced reforms to the National Competitive Grants Program.
Making it simpler.
Giving early career researchers more opportunities.
Strengthening collaboration.
Backing fundamental research.
And creating better pathways from discovery to impact.
If the last 25 years tell us anything, it is that the next 25 are not going to stand still.
And we can’t rely on importing discoveries made somewhere else.
We can’t just be passive consumers of others’ ideas.
We have to create knowledge too and make discoveries.
The AI race of the last few years has shown the importance of sovereign capability.
And that’s what the ARC is about too.
Nurturing our homegrown talent, developing Australian ideas.
We don’t know which research today will become part of the fabric of our lives in 2051.
We don’t know what it will change.
And we don’t know who will discover it.
But somewhere in Australia today there is a researcher asking a question that could lead us there.
Our job is to make sure they get the chance to find the answer.
That is what the ARC has done for the last 25 years.
And that’s what Australia needs it to do for the next 25.