Please, O Chief, Tell Us The Future Weird Science

Sydney Morning Herald

Thursday March 2, 2006

Pat Sheil

Hip, hip, hooray! Australia has a new Chief Scientist! There is dancing in the streets! Champagne flows without restraint! Young men and women in labs across the land throw their knickers in the air!

Wouldn't it be great if this were the case? Wouldn't it be marvellous if Chief Scientist was a position that not only demanded respect, but got it? Simply because we had someone in the job prepared to tell the truth about what this country will be like to live in when our children are worried about their children?

Maybe Jim Peacock, who got the job this week, is that person. But he doesn't come across that way, sad to say. His debut on ABC Radio yesterday was verging on the soporific.

The position of Chief Scientist should be that of a high priest, by which I mean someone who takes a long view, and then looks even further down the track. When my teenage daughter turns 60, it'd be nice if she could at least say that someone in 2006 was waving a red flag at short-sighted policy and insisting on sustainability and daring ideas.

Is Jim Peacock that someone? Probably not.

Peacock replaces Robin Batterham, who was famous only for juggling his part-time role as Chief Scientist with that of chief technologist with Rio Tinto. A greater conflict of interest would be hard to find in public life.

Peacock was not happy with this at the time, and said so. But he too is a hobbyist, and has walked into the same office, with the same occasional brief. The pay packet that counts comes for his gig at the CSIRO, where he heads plant genetics.

It simply isn't good enough. Sure, Peacock reckons that his CSIRO connection will make people feel good. "I think that the general public will relate to the idea that someone working with what they regard as a national icon will be Chief Scientist," he said on Tuesday.

National icon? Maybe. Once. Right now, the CSIRO is a dysfunctional mess that has a hard enough time getting a straight message past the scientific illiterates who sign their pay cheques and write their peculiar press releases.

The Greenland ice sheet is disintegrating, for crying out loud! We're going to have a hard enough time dealing with that in Sydney in 2050; the consequences in the deltas of South-East Asia will be horrific.

But not between now and the 2007 election.

This country doesn't even have a science minister. We have part-time experts being ignored by short-term flakes.

It is surely time that the scientific method got a look-in on national planning, and a modicum of respect for thinking past the next poll and looking at the data. A high priest/ess who owes nothing to anyone? Someone who tells us the truth, no matter how unpalatable it may be? That would be cause for celebration.

© 2006 Sydney Morning Herald

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