HASS in the Capital - Day #2

Day 2 of HASS in the Capital, hosted in Canberra by the Council of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences. A lot of the discussion was about process and futures for CHASS, but the main event was the address to the National Press Club by Senator Kim Carr, the Minister for Industry, Innovation, Science and Research. The full text of Senator Carr's speech can be accessed here.

Senator Carr's speech contained a number of new initiatives, including the Australian Laureate scheme to replace Federation Fellowships, new policies to promote international research linkages, and a new Head of the CSIRO. For those who think that the arts and humanities have something to offer national innovation policies, Senator Carr is very interested in developing such links at a practical level.

What was striking was that the questions at the National Press Club are only asked by the assembled (small) group of journalists, who receive the speech in advance. It was fascinating to note that of the 10 questions, only two could be said to relate to the Minister's themes in the speech around education and research, and one of those was asked by the moderator, Ken Randall. Others came with set question about the car industry, the textile industry, carbon reduction policy (two questions, including one by Glenn Milne (see earlier post)), and one on whether it would be innovation if the Minister's department started using green pens instead of red pens.

A game of two halves. Good speech; crap questions from the media. This may be about how CHASS has to do more to make its issues more relevant to the media, but it also showed a high degree of laziness among the assembled journalists.

HASS in the Capital 2008 - Day #1

I am at HASS in the Capital 2008, the annual gathering of leaders in the Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences (HASS) organised by the Council for Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences (CHASS) in Canberra.

Tuesday night involved a dinner at the Old Parliament House, where the keynote speaker was Professor Mary O'Kane, former Vice-Chancellor of the University of Adelaide, chair of the recent review of Co-operative Research Centres, and now the CEO of the Australasian Centre for Interaction Design (ACID).

Key points from Mary O'Kane' talk were:

• universities need to be agile in allowing new knowledge fields to emerge that cross disciplinary boundaries;
• there is a need to let go of discipline areas as required as new opportunities emerge
• if the 20th century was one where science and technology fields were the key knowledge driver, this will not be the case in the 21st century, as the underlying conditions have become much more complex
• this presents a big opportunity for the HASS sectors in explaining the changes that underpin new technology developments
• the HASS sector is being strongly encourage to have a greater role in Co-operative Research Centres (CRCs)
• CRCs are to put a lot more emphasis on 'market failure' issues and generating research rather than commercialisation outcomes.

As someone from the HASS sector involved in a CRC (the Smart Services CRC, to have its Brisbane launch on Thursday), these observations were interesting, particularly as they relate to the under-representation of the services sectors in current CRCs.

HASS will today discuss future directions. There is not a meeting with parliamentarians this year.

There will also be a lunch-time speech by Senator Kim Carr, the Minister responsible for research and innovation in the Rudd Labor Government. I'll post on that later.