Book 8 - Parliament of Victoria

AUSTRALIAN SYNCHROTRON: FUNDING
Wednesday, 1 June 2011 COUNCIL 1639
community. The Australian Synchrotron is the
country’s largest user facility and the only operation of
its kind in Australia. It is a major part of Victoria’s, and
the nation’s, scientific infrastructure, providing
significant capabilities and delivering scientific,
educational and industrial benefits to Victoria, to the
rest of Australia and to New Zealand. I might add that
the industrial benefits are not well known, but they are
significant, and I will talk a little more about them later
in my contribution.
Many of the highest impact research programs which
depend on the synchrotron are very difficult to conduct
overseas. For example, it is often impossible, for
obvious reasons, to send biological tissue, live animals
and soil and plant samples offshore. The number of
users of the synchrotron has increased exponentially
since 2008 when 325 people used the facility. In
February 2010, 1600 people used the synchrotron.
At this point I want to touch on some of the
achievements of the Australian Synchrotron in the hope
that government members might be galvanised into
lobbying ministers and the Premier to save this facility.
The achievements of the synchrotron include
successfully staging the peak international synchrotron
science and technology conference, which is held every
three years and is hosted by a major international
synchrotron user facility. I am informed that hosting
such an event is very prestigious for the host country
and host synchrotron.
The synchrotron hosts over 3000 domestic and
international research visits per year. It has also been
instrumental in the lodging of 15 new patents. It has
generated 336 scientific papers since 2007, which is a
great deal, and these have been in areas as diverse as
immunology, biomedicine, mineral processing,
environmental sustainability, food security, accelerator
physics and instrument development. This is equal to or
better than any other leading synchrotron at a
comparable time of its development. A further
420 papers were generated by work done at the
Australian National Beamline Facility. Of these
756 scientific papers, approximately 70 per cent have
appeared in journals with an A-star or A rating under
the Excellence in Research for Australia assessment
scheme, including leading international science journals
such as Nature. This is comparable to the performance
of Australia’s best research groups.
Research undertaken at the facility is making a positive
contribution to Australia’s national research priorities,
creating an environmentally sustainable Australia,
promoting and maintaining good health, developing
frontier technologies for building and transforming
Australian industries, and safeguarding Australia. The
Australian Synchrotron has attracted new research
infrastructure grants totalling $51.48 million, which are
being used to further strengthen the facility’s
capabilities. The fact that the synchrotron has attracted
that funding indicates that it is ticking all the right
boxes in terms of where it is going as a major piece of
scientific infrastructure.
Activities undertaken by commercial clients — and this
is the area of most relevance to this motion — are
contributing to the development of anti-infective drugs,
electronic and bio-analytical measurement instruments,
biofuel products, pharmaceutical and nutraceutical
products and bio-pharmaceuticals.
The Australian Synchrotron’s beamlines are
oversubscribed. In some cases requests for beam time
are more than three times the availability,
demonstrating the high demand for its techniques.
Between 2007 and 2008 cumulative publication
numbers for two of the synchrotron’s most popular
techniques, powder diffraction and macromolecular
crystallography, rose from zero to 50 and 100
respectively. There is more I can say, but in the
interests of time I will end my elaboration of the
achievements there and continue with my contribution.
The achievements of the synchrotron demonstrate how
much Victoria and Australia need the synchrotron. The
synchrotron gives us a leading and competitive edge in
technology, research and development. We are
currently at the forefront of major scientific discoveries.
We have opportunities that are available to only a small
number of countries. There are fewer than 40 such
facilities in the world. It is the largest stand-alone
scientific structure in the Southern Hemisphere, yet it is
at risk.
Earlier in my contribution I asked how we came to a
position whereby scientific infrastructure critical for the
future of our state is now being put at risk. How did we
come to this? We came to this by the coalition playing
irresponsible, inane, lowest-common-denominator
retail politics — in other words, it made some
outrageous promises and never thought it would be in a
position to implement those promises. In order to
implement at least some of its promises, the Baillieu
government had to cry poor, hence the black holes.
Having cried poor and supposedly softened up the
electorate, it then had to find cuts that could be made,
and the most logical way to cut programs was to find
programs which had lapsed. That is how it landed on
the synchrotron.