Optimist! Perhaps you are hoping for a statesman to magically appear on the scene, after our politicians have been running down Australia's scientific capital for a generation - troglodytes all!

Though your wishlist of proposed actions might not be perfect, its implementation would be a wonderful start towards repair of run-down infrastructure.
Even from the essential, yet ignored, area of taxonomy to the, largely abandoned, scientific repository of knowledge and research of the Australian National Botanic Gardens. What a dream that these fundamentally necessary aspects of Australian science might be adequately resourced at last!

When Slim Dusty trilled his tune – ‘Looking Back and Looking Forward’, maybe from a scientific point of view, his title should have read - ‘Looking Back helps Looking Forward’ similar to looking in a rear vision mirror.

Though I myself feel pride in quoting the background of Western history from Golden Greece to what we are today, the bulk of the detail is simply referred to as unnecessary Old Pap.

Does this mean that Scientific Advancement right in this electronic age where we are able to hear and view on TV, sportsmen excitedly chatting to each other on 20/20 cricket, means that reasoning itself has ceased to be a science?

Is this why John Howard spoke of the need to tone down the Humanities, scientific reasoning itself so revealed in the Philosophy of History, now in the lesson books not held in high esteem.

No need now to find out where we came from or knowledge of the fortitudes our former brethren went through to produce the democracy we now live in, but just a corporate cultural smart-arseness, that since the beginning of the industrial age, has been thrown out
twice before.

My dentist was a research scientist, until he realised he had a responsibility to provide for his family.

Hasbeen

The first place to find $$$ to fund research would be cutting the mega PR salaries of CSIRO spin doctors. The ones that hid the truth about climate change.