Tag Archive for: research and development

As Trump sacks scientists, Australia should hire them. US drain is our brain gain

US President Donald Trump, his powerful offsider Elon Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) are slashing public spending in an effort to save US taxpayers anywhere between US$500 billion and US$2 trillion.

Caught up in these enormous cuts are scientists, researchers, medical experts, technologists and PhD scholars who are losing jobs, grants and scholarships at an unprecedented rate as funding streams are cancelled or put on hold.

To date, DOGE has allegedly made only US$105 billion of cuts. This means they have, at minimum, hundreds of billions to go. In the science and technology sector, these early cuts may be just the beginning.

Believe it or not, there is an enormous opportunity for Australia in this unusual situation. If the government acts quickly, this is a once-in-a-century brain gain opportunity.

Australia should take a two-pronged approach. We should attract some of our best and brightest back home from places such as Silicon Valley while also offering fast-track visas to top US-based scientists and researchers who are newly out of a job or low on the funding they need to keep their start-up or scientific lab running.

Australia’s ability to keep up with rapid advances in scientific developments and critical technologies will determine the shape and size of our economy for decades to come. Most of our strategic partners—the United States, Japan, Britain, the European Union and South Korea—are larger and have globally competitive tech sectors they’ve spent decades building. In recent years, these have included artificial intelligence, semiconductors, quantum and biotechnology.

As a mid-sized mining and tourism-dependent economy, Australia has long known we need to diversify our economy and increase our low national spend on research and development, which sits well below the OECD average.  We also know we need greater self-sufficiency so we don’t continue to become over-reliant on any one single market for access to technologies we have deemed ‘critical’ to our future. Building greater sovereign capability in our science and technology sector is a more important goal than ever.

But we are struggling to keep pace with others. We haven’t spent decades investing in building up our tech sector or making big technological bets when we’ve had the opportunity. Things are now moving so quickly that we’re increasingly in danger of being completely left behind.

Coming from behind doesn’t mean we can’t catch up. It does mean, however, that we need to prioritise innovative and out-of-the-box thinking and we must take more risks.

In early 2025, we find ourselves in an unusual situation where our closest ally has, rather unexpectedly, flooded the global market with science and technology talent. The cuts are ongoing and broad, impacting almost everything, including medical schools advancing cancer prevention, high-performance computing, climate and oceanic analysis and the use of AI in national security work.

Other countries will respond to this opportunity quickly. As public funding into universities declines and US universities reduce PhD admissions, top Chinese universities are already proactively recruiting overseas students, allowing undergraduates to skip traditional pathways to fill up PhD programs in areas such as mathematics, engineering, computer science and environmental science.

Canada, seen as a global leader for attracting technology talent, will likely be a key beneficiary of this talent flood. Its variety of visas, low processing times and proactive talent recruitment campaigns is one reason it recently saw 10,000 foreign tech workers in the US apply for permanent residency in Canada in one 48-hour period.

For decades, the US has provided funding and a home for many of our scientists, entrepreneurs and technologists. Now there’s a unique opportunity for us to reverse that brain drain while also increasing our investment in US talent and technologies. In doing so, we’d be contributing to greater burden-sharing in the US-Australia alliance (specifically AUKUS Pillar 2), noting that Australia has long benefited from—even piggybacked—on US scientific advancements and breakthroughs made in everything from health to renewable energies to defence technologies.

In order to identify the types of scientists, researchers and technologists that would be of greatest benefit to Australia and the potential visa options open to them, the Department of Home Affairs should work with our diplomats, our defence, CSIRO and Department of Industry Science and Resources officials, our intelligence community, and others to form a small, agile taskforce.

Minister for Home Affairs Tony Burke should work with parliamentary colleagues and his department to quickly explore options to expand and fast track visas. Visa options must be fast and flexible or we’ll lose out to other countries vying for their expertise.

Australia’s ambassador in the US, Kevin Rudd, and his team are well placed to provide a picture of which top scientists have lost funding. They could work with others in government to promote Australia as a top destination for technology talent while also working collaboratively with the US government to explain how these investments would also benefit them.

The government can play a key knowledge broker role by helping to link up scientific labs and startups with grant opportunities, universities and venture capital firms open to investing in them. In exceptional cases, wealthy individuals should make an extraordinary contribution to Australia’s national interests by partnering with the government to attract outstanding scientists and their teams. This public-private investment may end up helping Australia through the next pandemic, provide us with a leading edge in AUKUS Pillar 2 technologies or devise a cure for Alzheimer’s. It could unearth new methods for environmentally sustainable and cost-competitive extraction of critical minerals. All would provide shared benefit to our alliance with the US and close partnerships.

Knowing Musk’s cuts will continue, the winner of the Australian election should assess and expand this talent drive, particularly given the inevitable benefits to our job market and national prosperity.

In 2025, in the concerning global environment we find ourselves in, a business as usual approach won’t cut it. Australia must be ready to jump on rare opportunities as they arise, take more risks and make big bets.

An enormous opportunity is here now. Soon it will be staring us in the face. It’s time for our parliamentarians to jump.

Innovation for security: why Australia needs its own DARPA

Australia should establish a national centre for breakthrough technologies along the lines of the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).

An Australian Advanced Research Projects Agency (AARPA) is needed to stay competitive with other powers in the Indo-Pacific in artificial intelligence (AI), quantum computing and biotechnology.

China, well aware of the power of state guidance and funding for high-risk, high-reward technological development, aims to position itself as a world leader in those technologies. It has spent more than US$15 billion on quantum computing, US$220 billion on biotech and US$184 billion on AI, guided by the Chinese Communist Party’s five-year strategic plans.

In 2023, Britain established its own DARPA equivalent, the Advanced Research and Invention Agency (ARIA). So an AARPA would be the third leg of a tripod of AUKUS organisations. It would enhance collaboration on breakthrough technologies under pillar 2 of the AUKUS agreement.

In December, the Australian government announced a review of the Australian research-and-development landscape. If it is serious about technological collaboration within the AUKUS agreement and being a key player in Indo-Pacific security, it will need to back that up with serious changes to Australian research funding.

Australia has the potential for greater contribution to global research. However, it has historically failed to spend much on science. Government research and development spending has been less than 0.2 percent of GDP for years. Even gross R&D spending, which includes business, is only 1.68 percent of GDP, well below the OECD average of 2.7 percent. China is spending 2.4 percent and the US 3.5 percent.

Despite that, Australia publishes more papers per capita than Britain, the US or China. Imagine the volume and impact of high-value inventions that we could be producing if we invested properly in research and translation.

Australia consistently underestimates itself. Selling minerals to China shouldn’t be our future. Economic de-coupling from Chinese growth is essential for Australia’s national security and sovereignty. In a more fragmented world, where nations are increasingly investing in onshoring advanced manufacturing, investing in critical technologies is essential. Establishing an AARPA would be a big step in that direction.

The Chinese Communist Party’s five-year plan for the period to 2025 has outlined China’s ambition to become the world leader in AI, biotech and quantum technologies.

AI is already rapidly accelerating progress in biotechnology, enabling the design of new drugs. However, those technologies have dual-use potential, enabling the design of advanced bioweapons. BGI Group, which has ties to the Chinese military, collected vast amounts of genetic information globally during the Covid-19 pandemic, raising concerns about potential misuse. BGI was recently restricted from doing business with US companies due to serious national-security concerns.

In response to the threat of Chinese dominance of biotechnologies, the US has established the National Security Commission on Emerging Biotechnology. The commission’s first report highlighted the convergence of biotechnology with AI and quantum computing and the ability of those technologies to rapidly transform the security landscape.

Western democracies must respond to these emerging threats by maintaining a technological advantage and reducing dependence on Chinese supply chains. That can be done only through strategic investment in sovereign technological capability.

The current government research funding model is broken. The success rate for government grants was below one in five in 2024 and has fallen steadily for the past two decades. Continuing decline risks serious brain drain to other countries.

To understand the value that an AARPA would bring, consider that, for decades, DARPA has been the world leader in funding transformative technologies. It created programs that gave us mRNA vaccines, GPS, drones, the internet and many other technologies that define the 21st century.

In contrast to the Australian government’s Defence Science Technology Group (DSTG), which directly employs scientists to conduct research, an organisation using the DARPA model would employ sector experts as term-limited program managers who are given autonomy in the design of funding programs. They would focus on high-risk, high-reward projects, creating breakthrough technologies for national security. In the US, DARPA’s independence enables it to respond to new developments and bet on technologies with transformational potential that would otherwise go unfunded. AARPA would complement DSTG by acting as a dynamic funding body able in invest in research across academia, government and industry.

The 21st century will be defined by advances in AI, biotech and quantum technologies, which are quickly combining to create faster advances than previously predicted. Those technologies have huge national-security implications. They will fundamentally change the security risks to Australia and our allies in ways that we can’t yet foresee. Australia is already a hub of innovation in these technologies, and our researchers can deliver projects faster than global competitors. Establishing an AARPA will ensure that Australia is able to continue to innovate and compete in a rapidly changing security environment.