Australian science and innovation in six charts

Australians take pride in being a competitive nation. We relish our world-leading position in many fields of endeavour, but we are far from the podium in one important area.

The Office of the Chief Scientist has released a report, Benchmarking Australian Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM), which measures Australia’s performance in key areas of science and innovation. It compares us against 11 western European nations, the United States, Britain and Canada, and key Asian neighbours.

The results are not uplifting. While we rank well in some areas, we’re far behind in other measures. Why care? Because science and innovation boost our standard of living and contribute to economic growth and jobs.

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I’ve been aware for some time that Australia’s rocket and satellite technology is lagging well behind that of Malaysia, South Korea, Singapore, Brazil, Israel, Canada, USA, Korea, India, Russia, Ukraine, Europe in general and UK, Germany, Italy and France in particular and possibly even Indonesia.

Was watching a TV program about sequencing DNA of “dead famous” people that gave me a bit of a shock. Countries able to completely sequence a human genome include Canada, USA, Japan, Korea, China, India, Russia, Israel, Belgium, France, UK, Germany, Norway and other parts of Europe. Australia was specifically mentioned as a country not capable of completely sequencing a human genome.

I wish people would stop treating the name of our country “Us-trail-ya” so literally.

You don’t need to sequence no G-gnome in a quarry.