Feds to fine-tune science blueprint

Only 18 months into its $2.9 billion Backing Australia's Ability program, the Federal government is looking to adjust its innovation blueprint -- and that could involve culling some elements that aren't working, Science Minister Peter McGauran has foreshadowed.

It was that reference to "culling" that set nerves jangling at yesterday's launch of the scientific community's own vision for Australian science's future, 'Australian Science: Investing in the Future'.

The report, by the Federation of Australian Scientific and Technological Societies (FASTS), showed that government and private investment in Australian science and technology had not kept pace with inflation and economic growth since 1996, and Australia was an also-ran among industrialised nations on most performance measures.

The FASTS report noted, among other things, that Australian universities and CSIRO were having to do more with less, as shrinking research funds from government force research and staff cutbacks.

McGauran said Backing Australia's Ability was 18 months into its five-year plan, and the government was "constantly assessing it and looking to refine it, improve it and even cull out those elements that haven't exactly hit the target as we hoped or envisaged."

It wasn't just scientists who twitched -- later, in the Senate, the Australian Democrats' spokeswoman on science, Senator Natasha Stott Despoja, asked McGauran, "Can the minister inform the chamber what programs the government was looking at culling, what criteria they used to determine these cuts, why they're being cut, when are these culling of programs due to take place?"

But a spokeswoman for McGauran later said that the Minister was referring to paperwork and reporting requirements of many of the Backing Australia's Ability programs.

FASTS is unconcerned -- Dr Ken Baldwin, chairman of FASTS' policy committee, said while he hasn't spoken to the Minister, "I doubt they're going to cut any money.

"We recognise that there's a continuous process of review, and re-jigging the various policies and incentives of Backing Australia's Ability."

One area requiring rejigging, according to AusBiotech, the industry association for Australian biotechnology companies, is a tax rebate scheme that would return 37.5c in the dollar to for small companies for money invested in R&D

AusBiotech said that under current criteria, most of the small biotech companies the scheme was intended to help are actually ineligible for the rebate.