A major review calls for sweeping reform of Australia’s research and innovation system – but questions remain about delivery, priorities and impact.

Amid global turmoil, the report of the Strategic Examination of R&D (SERD) calls for “bold reform” of Australia’s “broken” research and innovation system. What better time to prepare for an uncertain future.

_Ambitious Australia_ joins a long line of reports stretching back to the Hawke-Keating era, when public spending on science, research and innovation gained a 40 per cent boost in real terms. By the end of the 1990s, knowledge-driven “elaborately transformed manufactures” were the fastest growing component of Australia’s export mix, with productivity growth running well above the OECD average.

We are now in a very different world. If the SERD report did nothing other than highlight the precarious state of Australia’s hard-won prosperity, it would still have performed a valuable service. And on this it does not hold back.

The report notes that Australia’s manufacturing share of GDP is the lowest among developed economies, business expenditure on R&D is also the lowest as a share of GDP and productivity growth is the lowest on average over the past decade for 60 years.

Of course, correlation is not causation. But as manufacturing is the major source of business R&D spending in most........

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