Time for science and business to ‘team up on critical thinking’

Peter Yates and Megan Clark are the joint recipients of the 2019 Australian Academy of Science Medal.

Peter Yates.

A director of the billionaire Myer family empire and a former Packer family executive turned trailblazer in Australian science says scientific institutions must work more with the business community to reassert the power of critical thinking in the nation’s political and economic debates.

Businessman Peter Yates and Australian Space Agency head and the first female chief executive of the CSIRO, Megan Clark, are the joint recipients of the prestigious 2019 Australian Academy of Science Medal.

Dr Clark is also a director of global mining giant Rio Tinto and international blood plasma group CSL, the latter widely revered as one of the nation’s most successful global enterprises.

With the support of former South Australian premier Mike Rann, Mr Yates helped found both the Australian Science Media Centre and the Royal Institution of Australia.

Both are based in Adelaide’s old Stock Exchange building and were established in a bid to change the cultural relationship between the Australian populous and science and increase science-related media content.

Mr Yates said there was too often a “transactional relationship” between science and business, “not a cultural relationship”.

“There isn’t the same relationship you would find between business and politics. You can also commercialise an internet or venture capital idea over a cup of coffee but you can’t commercialise a science idea. Because the coffee conversations don’t take place,’’ he said.

But he said it was improving.

“The academies have done a tremendous job in reaching out to businesspeople, who are starting to learn more about why they need to be involved in that conversation,’’ Mr Yates said.

He said the climate change debate had made it culturally acceptable for even the most well educated in society to argue a position based on their beliefs — or political motives — rather than evidence. Mr Yates said the explosion of search engines and social media had created the opportunity for pseudo-science and myths to flourish.

“Notwithstanding the complications of the climate change debate, the politicians have come out as the people that can’t be trusted with it, not the scientists,’’ Mr Yates said. “The community’s expectation would be that we would have done more as a nation to have a sensible policy around climate change and energy.”

Dr Clarke, who is also a director of Care Australia and recently chaired the Expert Working Group into the Review of Australia’s Space Industry Capability, said: “My career has been dedicated to using breakthrough science to create value for our nation and everyday lives: whether it was using geological science to discover mines or understanding how primitive archaea (single-celled micro-organisms) could create a new way to make copper at BHP or new animal vaccines or gene technology for cotton at CSIRO.”

Reserve Bank of Australia director Carol Schwartz and her entrepreneur and venture-capitalist husband Alan Schwartz, who together run the Trawalla Group, said it was now important, more than ever, to celebrate the achievements of science.

“We must tirelessly reassert the criticality of rational thinking in our social, economic and political discourse,’’ they said.