Opinion: The all-new adventures of Kev & Kim

It is with best wishes, an open mind and only a modicum of anxiety that we welcome the new era that swept Australia last November 24, when our collective soul dared to tear itself gently but firmly from the grasp of the elderly gentleman in the Wallabies tracksuit and hitch itself to the Kevin07 bandwagon. In 2008, we hope to snuggle up and prosper in Kevin0Heaven Land, where education is a revolution, science gets a place in the inner cabinet and Iced VoVos are an ironic metaphor.

We have been promised no frightening changes, bar the aforementioned revolutionary activity in our secondary schools, although I suspect a lot of us, like Peter Garrett, are secretly hoping for a little excitement. Early indications were not good for the acronym fans among us, with the new Department of Innovation, Industry, Science and Research - Dizzer? - proving a bit of a gobful, but everything else looks more chipper. The new science minister is a former school teacher, a former researcher for the meatworkers' union and, thrillingly, comes armed with a marvellous nickname, Kim Il-Carr, referring to his dubious past as an anorak-wearing socialist, which surely bodes well for our nation's punsters.

Mr Kim's first act after being sworn in last December was a symbolic but meaningful gesture - the restoration of independence to the Australian Research Council. I'm sure that under the previous government the good people at the ARC acted independently anyway, but they must be sighing with relief that certain people, one with a certain beard, carrying certain ideological baggage, will no longer be thrust upon them. We were also pleased that Mr Kim's second act was to cancel - or most likely postpone - the implementation of the Research Quality Framework, a good idea in principle that has become bogged down in such detail and red-tape as to become soul-destroying for anyone trying to understand it.

Like much of the late government's activity over the last 12 years, we always suspected that the RQF was more about being seen to be instituting a 'reform' - which we always understood to be an attempt to improve things, rather than create an administrative quagmire - and that one of its great champions, the former Minister for Saluting Flagpoles, now Her Majesty's Honourable Leader of the Opposition, Dr Brendan 'Super Hornet' Nelson, was only too happy to hand the whole mess over to his successor as minister for education in order to have fun purchasing really fast planes for the air force.

As we enter this brave new world in Kevin0Heaven Land, we do so with a positive outlook. We hope that Mr Kim and the new Deputy Prime Minister, Minister for Employment and Industrial Relations, Minister for Education, Minister for Social Inclusion and, presumably, Minister for Marshmallow-Flavoured Biscuits, Julia Gillard, are willing and able to tackle some of the serious structural flaws governing our education, science and research sectors.

We suspect they will resist the inevitable calls to throw buckets of cash at the problem, as Kevin and his bean-counter-in-chief, the way cooler Wayne Swan, would not look kindly on this, what with that money being better off in the wallets of ordinary working families and all, but we do hold out hope that more money, spent more wisely, is in the offing. We humbly remind our new leaders that the only people who managed to have a successful revolution on a minimal budget were the Cubans, and look what happened to their education system. Oh.

We hope that Kevin rethinks his plan to save some pennies for the collective piggy bank by taking the razor to such public entities as Invest Australia, an organisation we are fond of. We hope that on one of Mr Kim's upcoming fact-finding tours overseas he will stumble across someone, somewhere, who can suggest a user-friendly method for funding basic research that does not involve scientists spending most of their time filling out grant applications. We hope the terms 'low-hanging fruit' and 'punching above our weight' are banned from ministerial press releases, although this might be a forlorn one.

Our final hope is to have an interview with Mr Kim for the next issue of ALS, outlining exactly what he plans to do and what we can look forward to for the next three years. In return, we promise to lay off the puns. It's so Howard era.