E&OE

LAURA JAYES: Joining me live now is Universities Australia Chief Executive Luke Sheehy. Thanks so much for your time, Luke. I really appreciate it. When it comes to productivity and the upcoming productivity roundtable, research and development is really at the forefront of this in so many ways. Yes, it comes down to private businesses, publicly listed companies, but a lot of people might not realise that a lot of this research and development is done through universities. What is the state of it at the moment and the pipeline?

LUKE SHEEHY: Well, good to be with you. Today I’ll be meeting with Tim Ayres in his capacity as Minister for Industry Science and Innovation on a preliminary roundtable to talk about this very important topic. Australia can’t have a productive economy if we don’t invest in R&D. We are lagging behind the OECD average. The ambition to get us from three per cent is an important one to drive outcomes for our economy. We need our SMEs to develop new ideas and turn them into profit and turn that into jobs for Australians. Universities are at the centre of that. We already undertake nearly $14 billion of research in the research ecosystem in Australia, but we can do more. And of course, so can government and so can industry. So that’s the message today. We have also released two important reports that paint a dire picture about the state of where we are heading. We know that we will have a deficit of nearly 12,000 PhD researchers by the 2030s if we don’t attract more people to do PhDs. And it’s not just to become academics, it’s to become the futurists in our industry to develop the new ideas, products and breakthroughs we so desperately need.

LAURA JAYES: So, what’s the problem at the moment? Because you’re still pushing ahead with some of this great work in universities, but it seems to me from this report that you’ve put out today that red tape and this kind of well kaleidoscope spider web, whichever way you want to put it, of programs, just make it really complex, more complex than it needs to be.

LUKE SHEEHY: Well, our analysis shows that the government spends $14 billion on research in the system already, but it spends it across 14 different areas of the government, across 150 programs. It’s fragmented and it’s disjointed, and frankly, it’s not giving us the bang for the buck that we need. So, we’re calling on the government not to spend more, but to spend smarter and create a ministerial council that looks at coordinating how research is spent in the Commonwealth. We can do better. We can break down the fragmentation and get rid of the duplication that clearly exists across that $14 billion spend. We need to be smarter. We don’t always need to pile more money into a system that isn’t operating at its best. So, the government has a role to play absolutely in lifting its small amount of spend on public research, which is less than one per cent of GDP. If we’re going to get to three per cent., we need government, universities and business to do more.

LAURA JAYES: Absolutely, we do. And with generative AI and agentic AI playing such an increasingly big role in our lives. I mean, you can’t stop this freight train from coming and universities are really at the forefront. The benefit, the way I see it, Luke, is that actually it’s going to make some of this research and development way more cost effective, way more efficient and you’re going to get results sooner than you would’ve done in the past. But you’ve also got to look at the pipeline of skills that universities are shaping. Does there need to be a whole rethink on how universities set courses, what courses they offer, what skills that we’re actually trying to develop for the future? Are we too stuck in the past on that?

LUKE SHEEHY: Look, I don’t think we are. Australia has world-class cutting-edge universities and part of that cutting edge is the way that we teach our students, not just from Australia, Laura, but we’ve talked about this a lot, from 140 countries across the world. We are embracing AI because if we don’t embrace it and navigate it and provide the next generation with the skills to use it, then we’ll get lost in the global race. And so, our curriculum, the way we teach and using AI as a tool for the way we live, research and develop our next generation of professionals is critically important. This is the message that we’ve put to the government in our submission to the economic roundtable. More productive workers in the future economy will drive our future success and they need to understand AI. Can I also have a shout out to many of our social scientists and researchers in the humanities? They are going to help us navigate rapid technological transformation and understand how society adapts to phenomenal changes like AI. So, it’s important that we just don’t have STEM workers, technology, engineering and maths, but also people studying the humanities and social sciences. That’s critical if we’re to understand how to navigate this new AI frontier.

LAURA JAYES: Luke, thanks so much. Looking forward to talking to you again in and around the productivity roundtable. Appreciate it and see you soon.

LUKE SHEEHY: Great to be with you.

ENDS