A RESEARCH centre that offers independent advice to the Australian government about science policy is fighting a rearguard action to stay alive. The struggle confronting the Centre for Research Policy at the University of Wollongong is the latest example of a worrying trend – the flow of policy advice to government from independent sources is under threat.
I raised this issue last week when discussing the way the Australian Science and Technology Council, set up to advise government, has been brought firmly under the wing of the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet. The experience of Stephen Hill and his group at Wollongong add to my fears. A lot is at stake. The centre is doing detailed research on the performance of the Cooperative Research Centres programme. It is helping the CSIRO to analyse its new management structures, and it is well to the fore in Australia’s efforts to establish scientific and technological links with Asia.
Like all the Australian government’s special research centres, the centre was reviewed after three years operation by a panel appointed by the Institutional Grants Committee of the Australian Research Council. This is normally a routine event. The six year review is regarded as the tough one.
The panel’s review, recommending closure, was just about on the desk of the Minister for Employment, Education and Training. I’m told his department liked the panel’s conclusions – all reached without any chance for Hill and his colleagues to respond. Moreover, the three-member panel chosen for the review had little recent experience in academic analysis of research policy – the mission of the Wollongong centre.
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After much manoeuvring within the ARC, the review is now back with the panel which has been asked to reconsider its verdict.
The review, I believe, claimed that the centre was too keen on popularising its work at conferences and seminars rather than publishing its research in learned journals. This is always a delicate issue, but there is little point doing policy research if the results are not fed into the debates of the day.
The Wollongong case suggests the process for review of research centres needs attention. Closing a research unit is a serious matter. There should be a mechanism for replying to criticism. Any dispute should be reviewed by assessors with expertise in the research field under the hammer.
The current system opens up the possibility of a centre being closed on the whim of a small group of public servants. It’s clear to me that bureaucrats within the Department of Employment, Education and Training are doing much of the pushing to scuttle the Wollongong outfit.
THE DEPARTMENT is also sitting on a report which drew conclusions that might not fit well with departmental dogma. Last August, Ron Johnston at the University of Sydney finished an investigation of the contentious issue of whether concentrating research resources has tangible benefits. His report, I believe, sees no great benefit in restricting research to large groups. Small research centres, and indeed individual researchers, have a part to play, according to the evidence amassed by Johnston. There’s still no sign of the published report even though its conclusions were referred to at Senate hearing last September. One has to start asking why.
IN APRIL, Meryl Williams, director of the Australian Institute of Marine Science, will be off to the Philippines. Williams will head the International Centre for Living Aquatic Resource Management – the first woman to occupy the post. It is a considerable honour for Williams. But her departure poses a problem for AIMS. She only took over as director last year. The structure of marine science in Australia is still under review, following the report by Ken McKinnon. Being without a leader, as other players manoeuvre for position, is a complication AIMS could have done without.
I’VE BEEN intrigued by the exploits of Kit Tucker from the CSIRO Division of Mining and Mineral Processing ever since I saw him conduct a small explosion in the parking area at last November’s Great Australian Science Show in Brisbane. The explosion was to do with demonstrating how to get minerals out of the ground.
The other day, I visited CSIRO’s shiny new lab in the outer Brisbane suburb of Pinjarra Hills to see what Tucker’s research is all about.
Just getting there required considerable determination. For some reason, CSIRO has sited its building midway between two bus stops. A 20 minute walk in the baking Brisbane sun is required to reach the place.
But it was worth it. Tucker showed me a simple, but ingenious, device he has built for breaking rock faces in mining operations. Instead of cutting small pieces off the rock, the device applies the wedge principle to break off large lumps. This reduces the energy needed to break the rock surface.
The device is working well in the prototype stage. Tucker is now looking for support from industry to take it to full-scale operation. This is the sort of positive development we were promised when CSIRO was reorganised. Let’s hope Tucker gets the support he deserves.
![Astronomers have long known that understanding how star clusters come to be is key to unlocking other secrets of galactic evolution. Stars form in clusters, created when clouds of gas collapse under gravity. As more and more stars are born in a collapsing cloud, strong stellar winds, harsh ultraviolet radiation and the supernova explosions of massive stars eventually disperse the cloud, and their light can bear down on other star-forming regions in the galaxy. This process is called stellar feedback, and it means that most of the gas in a galaxy never gets used for star formation. Researching how star clusters develop can answer questions about star formation at a galactic scale. Now, the state of the art has been further developed with both Hubble and Webb working together to provide a broad-spectrum view of thousands of young star clusters. An international team of astronomers has pored over images of four nearby galaxies from the FEAST observing programme (#1783), trying to solve this mystery. Their results show that it is the most massive star clusters that clear away their gaseous shroud the fastest, and begin lighting their galaxy the earliest. The team identified nearly 9000 star clusters in the four galaxies in different evolutionary stages: young clusters just starting to emerge from their natal clouds of gas, clusters that had partially dispersed the gas (both from Webb images), and fully unobstructed clusters visible in optical light (found in Hubble images). With Webb???s ability to peer inside the gas clouds, they were able to then estimate the mass and age of each cluster from its light spectrum. This image shows a section of one of the spiral arms of Messier 51 (M51), one of the four galaxies studied in this work, as seen by Webb???s Near-Infrared Camera (NIRCam). The thick clumps of star-forming gas are shown here in red and orange, representing infrared light emitted by ionised gas, dust grains, and complex molecules such as polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs). Within these gas complexes, each tens or hundreds of light years across, Webb reveals the dense, extremely bright clusters of massive stars that have just recently formed. The countless stars strewn across the arm of the galaxy, many of which would be invisible to our eyes behind layers of dust, are also laid bare in infrared light. [Image description: A large, long portion of one of the spiral arms in galaxy M51. Red-orange, clumpy filaments of gas and dust that stretch in a chain from left to right comprise the arm. Shining cyan bubbles light up parts of the gas clouds from within, and gaps expose bright star clusters in these bubbles as glowing white dots. The whole image is dotted with small stars. A faint blue glow around the arm colours the otherwise dark background.]](https://images.newscientist.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/13114322/SEI_296271016.jpg)
