Karen Andrews, federal science minister: in the eye of the storm
She’s the first federal science minister in almost three decades to have a science background. And Karen Andrews has her hands full.
It’s the third Monday of 2020, and as dawn breaks over Canberra, the nation’s weather is going bonkers. The terrifying bushfires that have already destroyed many millions of hectares are still ravaging swathes of south-eastern Australia, while a titanic dust storm has blanketed Dubbo in western NSW and flash floods in southern Queensland are being described as once-in-a-century. Meanwhile, a hailstorm is shattering windscreens across Melbourne and another massive thunderhead is bearing down on Canberra as Karen Andrews, the Federal Minister for Industry, Science and Technology, starts her day in Parliament House.
The wall-mounted TVs in her office flicker with footage of this meteorological mayhem, intercut with news about an ugly political stoush over climate change policy between Prime Minister Scott Morrison and his Liberal colleague from NSW, state environment minister Matt Kean. If 59-year-old Andrews is distracted by all this background noise she hides it well as she readies herself for another 18-hour day in the challenging role of science minister in a government accused by its fiercest critics of being anti-science.
“I have the best portfolio in the government,” she says with bright-eyed enthusiasm, almost as soon as we’re introduced, launching into a lengthy exposition on the diverse challenges of her job. In an earlier life, Andrews worked as a maintenance engineer on petrochemical plants, and fixing things remains her abiding passion. This will prove fortunate in the weeks after our meeting, as the catalogue of crises on her schedule grows exponentially. By early February she’ll be talking to CSIRO researchers about a possible vaccine for coronavirus; early March will find her rushing to ensure the country doesn’t run out of food and toilet paper as fears of a global pandemic trigger panic-buying and a sharemarket meltdown.
For the moment, though, we’re dealing with the simpler matter of the most destructive bushfires in Australian history. The first item on this morning’s agenda is a meeting with scientists from multiple agencies to map out a response to the fires, and the prospect of discussing satellite mapping with a roomful of boffins seems to put a genuine spring in Andrews’ step. With her fondness for candy pink jackets and mismatched false nails, she might seem an anomaly in the world of tech. In fact, she was a trailblazer in her chosen profession of engineering, and she’s that rare thing in conservative politics, a self-avowed feminist. She’s also the first science minister in nearly 30 years with actual scientific training.
“When I walk into a room of scientists, I feel as if I’m one of them,” she says. “When we’re talking manufacturing I can put my engineering hat on. Space research – I watched Neil Armstrong take his first steps on the moon. I mean, y’know, I’m happy as.”
After a decade of relative political anonymity, Andrews made front-page news in early January when she described climate sceptics as obstructionists who need to “move on” – a remark seen as a direct rebuke to Coalition colleagues such as George Christensen and Craig Kelly. Scientists applauded her stance, and praised her subsequent handling of a bushfire-crisis roundtable at Parliament House. It was a rare moment of positive spin for a government otherwise under attack for its funding cuts to climate research and its chaotic response to the fires.
On the day we meet, Andrews’ main engagement is a drive to Braidwood, a heritage town east of Canberra that lost 36,000ha of countryside and nearly all of its summer tourist business to the bushfires. Her plan is to talk to locals about their needs – a risky undertaking, given the Prime Minister’s experience in Cobargo and on Kangaroo Island earlier that month. “Look, if they’re upset and angry, I would much rather they tell me,” she says as she scans her briefing notes in the passenger seat. “This is not an exercise in ‘Let’s sit down and eat scones’. This is about them telling me what they think.”
A hailstorm of biblical fury has pummelled Canberra during the morning, so we’re driving across ice-strewn streets to get to the fire-scorched landscape to the east – a perfect metaphor for the summer’s unhinged weather. At the Braidwood Servicemens Club a handful of locals are gathered around a Formica table when Andrews arrives. Fiona Mutton, fourth-generation owner of the town’s general store, recounts how the fires cut the highway and killed the holiday trade, causing huge financial losses for many businesses. Martin Royds, a fifth-generation farmer who lost nearly a third of his pastures, says he’s just shut down his 12-cabin rural retreat because water supplies are drying up.
“What’s the issue with water?” Andrews asks.
“Ah... the river’s stopped flowing,” replies Royds phlegmatically. (Several weeks later, flash-flooding would hit the area.)
A couple at the table, Tim Wimborne and Meraiah Foley, recall how fire destroyed their commercial orchard of native pepper trees and a surrounding rainforest that had never burnt before. “It’s been such a difficult summer for us,” says Wimborne, a volunteer firefighter who seems dazed by what he’s endured. “We have to face whether we want to do that again, in uncertain times if the weather is getting hotter and rainfall is less.”
Andrews listens and tries to offer practical solutions: she’ll talk to her colleague Michaelia Cash about small business support, find out whether charitable donations can be directed to the town and see what programs the Department of Industry is running. “Let me be frank with you – I’m not here with a political hat on,” she says earnestly. “I’m actually here because I want to solve some problems… What I can do is take back some of the things you are saying.”
Some weeks later, the Government will improve its financial support for businesses hit by the fires, in response to meetings like this. But right now Andrews barely has 20 minutes for a planned chat with local firefighters up the road before she has to hit the road back to Canberra to make a flight to Queensland so she can be on the Sunshine Coast for a morning meeting with a helicopter company that has a you-beaut water-dumping machine.
When Scott Morrison promoted Andrews to his newly created ministry in August 2018, Australia achieved a dubious milestone: she became the 10th Australian science minister in almost as many years. It’s a revolving-door history that reflects the job’s lowly status in the political pecking order, and explains why people in the science and technology sector often sound battle-weary. Many still bear the scars of 2014, when the incoming Coalition government of Tony Abbott ripped roughly $1 billion out of funding to science bodies such as the CSIRO and Geoscience Australia, shifting money to future medical research.
Ian Chubb was Chief Scientist during that time and ruefully notes that science often falls victim to the first rule of government penny-pinching: first cut the programs that won’t cost you votes. Chubb speaks highly of Andrews, who he met when she was parliamentary secretary for industry and science from 2014-15, but has no illusions about the challenges she faces. “Karen is the sort of person who would always marshal the facts and the evidence – I can’t imagine her ever going into a meeting in a half-baked way,” he says. “What her colleagues do with that, I couldn’t predict.”
The current Government boasts of its “unprecedented” investment in projects such as Snowy 2.0 and hydrogen energy research, but the Australian Bureau of Statistics tells a different story: overall funding for research and development in Australia, as a percentage of Gross Domestic Product, has declined by roughly 14 per cent since the Coalition came to power in 2013. Venture capitalist Bill Ferris, who spent several years advising the Coalition as chair of Innovation and Science Australia, is one of many business figures who has warned about the dangers of this trend, describing last year’s budget as “a stunning lost opportunity”.
Even more scathing is Daniel Petre, a tech investor who worked alongside Ferris for three years at Innovation and Science Australia; he labels the Government “science-hating” and dismisses Andrews as politically ineffective. “Nothing coming out of her office challenges Morrison’s view,” Petre says, pointing out that even her recent comments on climate change were largely inarguable (“the climate has changed and it continues to change,” she said) and made no reference to reducing carbon emissions. Indeed, so quickly did the Prime Minister agree with her that some suspected it was all well-timed spin, a suggestion Andrews emphatically refutes. “Well, I didn’t clear it with anyone; nor was I sent out, either,” she replies. “I said it because I thought it was a statement of the bleedin’ obvious, quite frankly.”
For the record, Andrews does believe that climate change contributed to the intensity of the recent fires, and she accepts that human activity is contributing significantly to the changing climate. “That’s been quite clearly demonstrated to me – I’ve seen coral-core samples, I’ve seen ice-core samples from the Antarctic,” she says. “I think it puts it beyond any doubt that some of the things we do impact on our environment. And we need to change the way we go about doing things.”
But the resistance she faces in the Cabinet room became clear when her Queensland Coalition colleague, George Christensen, pointedly responded to her remarks by tweeting that “so-called climate change” gets too much funding. Asked about this, Andrews takes the road of least resistance. “Look, George has always had very strong views,” she replies. “I personally get on well with George, I understand his views don’t always equate with mine, but where they do equate is that he wants to do the absolute best for his electorate.”
It’s the kind of softly-softly answer Andrews is adroit at, which can be hard to square with the unconventional path of her early life. A gadget-obsessed girl (“I think I had two dolls in my life”), she spent her high-school years at the boys’ boarding school Townsville Grammar, which took a small number of girls as day students. There she excelled in maths and science, and received an early lesson in gender stereotyping at the end of Year 12. “There was myself and two other boys who got similar marks,” she recalls, “and the two boys were encouraged to do engineering and I was encouraged to be a maths teacher. It didn’t really strike me as a big deal at the time, but it did make me think, ‘What is engineering?’ So I looked at it and I thought it sounded pretty good.”
At Queensland Institute of Technology, Andrews and another female student became the engineering faculty’s first ever female graduates in 1983. From there she spent six years as a maintenance engineer with various energy companies before forming her own industrial relations consultancy in Victoria. It was through that work that she met her husband Chris, a human resources consultant at the time. (“I invited him for a coffee, because that’s pretty much all I drink,” she recalls. “After we’d been talking for about an hour he leaned across the table and said, ‘You realise we’ve got absolutely nothing in common’.”) In 2002, they moved with their three daughters to the Gold Coast, where Andrews became active in the local branch of the Liberal Party.
The couple’s oldest daughter, 24-year-old Emma, notes wryly that there was never much doubt where that might lead. “When we were in Girl Scouts, mum started off as a parent-helper and ended up as state representative. So when she started working in politics I thought, ‘No, it’s never going to end there’.” In 2009, Andrews won preselection for the Gold Coast seat of McPherson, fighting off a challenge from Peter Dutton, who had wanted to switch from his marginal seat of Dickson.
Conservative politics in Queensland has long been dominated by big swinging males, but Andrews is typically diplomatic about any resistance she ran up against. “Look, there were a few people who said to me, ‘You really shouldn’t bother because you’re not going to win’,” she recalls. “But my view was always: I have absolutely nothing to lose.” Her three daughters were aged from seven to 13 at the time, and Emma recalls that “the mother stigma” definitely reared its head. “I know that before her preselection a couple of male party members asked her, ‘What are your kids going to do?’,” she recalls. “I was like, ‘Luckily we have a dad, and he’s about to learn how to cook really well’. ”
After Abbott’s victory in 2013, Andrews became parliamentary secretary for industry and science, but the timing was not exactly auspicious. Abbott, who once described “the so-called settled” science of climate change as “complete crap” while in opposition, had by then already stunned the science community by decimating its funding in his first budget and failing to appoint a science minister for the first time since 1931. Abbott’s government slashed $459 million from the Carbon Capture and Storage Flagships program and shut down the Climate Commission, whose final report warned that extreme fire danger in southeast Australia was “very likely” over coming years. It cut another $450 million from the budget of major science organisations such as Geoscience Australia and the CSIRO, which subsequently closed down its Climate Adaptation Flagship and laid off more than 300 staff.
The legacy of those cuts endures today, according to climate scientists such as John Church, who was retrenched from the CSIRO in 2016 and is now a professor at the University of NSW. “I would agree we were ill-prepared for the bushfires because of a lack of research,” says Church. “People were removed from their positions and told not to communicate. But I would also say that these sorts of bushfire conditions were predicted decades ago. If somebody in the government wanted to be prepared, the information was there.”
Andrews was promoted to assistant minister for science after Malcolm Turnbull overthrew Abbott in 2015, promising a $1.1 billion “ideas boom” in innovative technology. Christopher Pyne was science minister and he praises Andrews as a capable and effective deputy whose engineering background proved valuable. But Turnbull’s vision alienated many voters, who saw IT and robotics as a threat to their jobs, and his plan to cut Australia’s carbon emissions with a National Energy Guarantee triggered an internal party revolt. It’s been reported that Andrews backed Peter Dutton in his first abortive bid to topple Turnbull in August 2018, then voted against a second leadership spill before ultimately voting for Scott Morrison. She won’t be drawn on that tumultuous time, but when the smoke cleared she had won another quixotic promotion: science minister.
Today Andrews’ toughest critics see her Cabinet post as a reward for helping torpedo a Liberal leader who tried to prise the party away from mining interests. “She’s intelligent,” says Daniel Petre, “but it was clear early on that she was given the gig as a thankyou from Scott, because she was a nowhere person in the hierarchy of the government. Suddenly she gets this role – which, by the way, no one else wanted.” Petre dismisses recent government announcements such as the $41 million Australian Space Agency and $30 million Artificial Intelligence program as hopelessly underfunded gimmicks worthy of the ABC satire Utopia.
Andrews responds that the Government must map out its science strategy with caution, alluding to the blowback that Turnbull’s grand vision created. “The likes of Daniel Petre and others involved in the tech space have no fear of artificial intelligence, and that’s great – I have no particular fear of artificial intelligence either. But there are many people out there who are concerned about what artificial intelligence actually means – is a machine going to take over and start making decisions? The reality is, that is what artificial intelligence is about. But if you have the right mechanisms in place and the right framework, it shouldn’t be a scary thing.”
Asked about the government’s failure to maintain research funding and reluctance to shift the economy away from coal, Andrews offers familiar arguments: budgets have their limits; mining and farming are crucial to the economy; electricity costs must be kept reasonable to protect businesses and households. The government is not anti-science, she insists, although her response offers a hint of the frustrations she must regularly confront in the party room: “Look, from my own party’s point of view, I think there’s an interest in the science. But, like with everything, it’s finding the right entry points to engage people.”
The catastrophic bushfires have certainly reinforced the image of a government that failed to see the future rushing towards it. On Twitter Andrews is regularly taunted with a photo from 2017 that shows her in parliament, grinning as she clutches the lump of coal that Scott Morrison notoriously brandished in the House of Representatives. While moderate Liberals such as Trent Zimmerman now publicly pressure the Prime Minister to adopt a net zero emissions target by 2050, Andrews has remained silent on that issue. Asked why, she replies: “I think we should just take appropriate action to reduce emissions rather than talking about it.”
In late January, the Prime Minister unveiled what that action would be in three words: “Technology, not taxation”. The science of solar power, hydrogen, batteries and carbon capture would be key elements in a “technology roadmap”, which the Government promised to release within a month. That announcement seemed to put Andrews front and centre in the government’s plans, given that technology is part of her job title. In fact, the policy is being run by the Minister for Energy and Emissions Reduction, Angus Taylor, who revealed that the roadmap wasn’t quite as ready as the Prime Minister had suggested and would emerge “over the rest of this year”.
If Andrews is frustrated, she disguises it well. Her role, she says, will be providing information on key scientific research as required by Taylor and his departmental staff. “I sit next to him in the chamber so I get to talk to him about this every single Question Time,” she says. “I feed into it, but Angus is the lead.”
In February, Andrews was given the job of facing the media after General Motors announced the death of Holden, a task she executed with straightforward aplomb, reminiscing about the Torana she drove as a teenager while slapping the company down for failing to properly consult the government about its announcement. In early March she announced a new $68.5 million Cooperative Research Centre to be focused on “clean energy”, and a new initiative to monitor female enrolments in science and technology education. Then the coronavirus turned into a global crisis and Andrews became a key player in the government’s response as it scrambled to reassure the public about both the contagion itself and the panic-buying that soon began threatening supplies of food, toilet paper and sanitising products.
By the second week of March she was on the phone to major food companies to get a handle on the state of their supplies, then began organising another crisis roundtable meeting – this time of major business groups to map out a response to possible shortages of essential goods caused by industry shutdowns overseas. In a sign of her rising profile, she fronted the media on March 9 to hose down panic-buying and reassure the public that supplies of bread and other products were assured.
“I’m not seeing a huge problem in the supply chain at this moment,” she said later that day as she drove from Brisbane to her Gold Coast electoral office. She had just attended the wrenching funeral of Brisbane mother Hannah Clarke and her three children, murdered by their father three weeks earlier. Now she was heading into an afternoon of gathering data about the nation’s warehouse stocks and talking to Foreign Affairs mandarins about possible shortages of Chinese plastic packaging. “It’s OK at the moment – I certainly don’t want anyone to be alarmed, because I’m not,” she said. “Something could come out of the blue – I would never have anticipated a rush on toilet paper. But bread is not going to be a problem. Frankly, things are changing on an hourly basis, but it’s actually really impressive, the level of co-operation we are getting… I am seriously not alarmed, I’m just working through what’s required.”
A few weeks earlier, Andrews had at one point taken me aside and leant in, as if to talk in confidence. “I just want you to know,” she said earnestly, “I’m doing this job because I really want to make a difference. I’m not in it for any other reason than to help people. It’s the engineer in me,” she added lightly. “I see a problem and I just want to fix it.”
For Karen Andrews, the year ahead could prove that old adage: be careful what you wish for.