It makes absolutely perfect sense to invest in your own people and their better ideas! We're not too bad at the better ideas stuff, just lack an ability to bring them to commercial fruition! And demonstrably so because our government is AWOL in this most crucial of all area!

We just don't need, shark venture capitalists, who want not just a pound of flesh, but lock, stock and barrel and for a pittance!

I see a future where electric cars run on inboard thorium power generators, for up to 100 years on a single fuelling?

This'll mean the family jalopy can be kept rust free and road worthy for that time and do service for the grandkids and their families!

Similarly, trains, ships, subs, off grid factories and bases could be completely and independently powered by larger more powerful versions!

And lead to a similar pulsed laser light UHF magnetic resonance anti gravity device still on a drawing board, as I write?

The (Chief scientist) Finkel Report aimed almost exclusively at stifling/straight jacketing energy efficiencies, I thought, rather than fearlessly and without favor, laying the irrefutable scientific, research based facts on the table, for a, I believe, highly blinkered, manifestly recalcitrant political party, I believe, effectively working against this nation's best interest energy policy!? And for at least the last decade?

That being so, how can we expect them to get it right when it comes to adequately funding publicly funded research? Science and research demonstrably just not important enough in the corridors of power in Canberra?
Alan B.

Any student who needs to be motivated by their university, should not be wasting tax payer money by being at any university in the first place.

I agree with Hasbeen on this one.

On a related matter, the term "efficiences" (plural) is part of the Newspeak of the anti-intellectual "needs of industry" lobby. I remember a conversation once with the investor Robert Holmes a court who was sounding off about the failure of physicists to attain a foothold in what he called "the real world". I mentioned the role of physics (including at my university which is where the conversation took place) exploring the forces governing our and other galaxies in the unfolding of the Big Bang 13.8 billion years ago. "I believe you're in acquisitions, Mr Holmes a court", I remarked. The bloke's a gentleman and I received a polite "I take your point. Another coffee?".