The Prime Minister’s Prizes for Science for 2011 were presented by the Prime Minister and Senator Kim Carr, Minister for Innovation, Industry, Science and Research at the Prize Dinner in the Great Hall of Parliament House on Wednesday 12 October.
Below is the text of the minister’s speech.
Minister’s speech:
In June this year I stood before the international science community to reaffirm Australia’s commitment to host the Square Kilometre Array – a telescope ten thousand times more powerful than any in existence today.
I made this pledge on our nation’s behalf.
We offer you the chance to excel in science.
We can be an epicentre of new knowledge in the twenty-first century.
We will not compromise our commitment to discovery.
We will not apologise for our ambitions for progress.
I am proud to reaffirm that pledge tonight, in the presence of Australia’s newest Nobel laureate.
Professor Brian Schmidt is a classic example of that commitment to the rigorous methods of science.
To hold true to your observations, when every orthodoxy tells you the numbers can’t be right.
To repeat the experiments, and double-check the calculations, day on day and year on year.
To collaborate and compete with the best in the world.
To make and justify your claims in the halls of peer review.
To strive to know the world, that we might remake it for the better.
These are heavy expectations to set for yourself – or to ask of others.
But they are not simply the standards we apply to Nobel prize winners.
They are the hallmark of every man and woman who signs up to the quest for knowledge.
Astronomers and engineers. Chemists and historians. Research leaders and lab assistants.
It is researchers of every age, of every discipline, working with government and industry to build a better world.
I have called this our compact with the research community.
We will back you with the best kit the country can afford. We ask, in return, for the wherewithal to help our people. To cure the sick. To build better factories. To save the planet.
No matter your quest, and no matter your skills, you are united by the same basic principles. Excellence. Integrity. Transparency. Results that stand the test of global scrutiny.
These commitments matter, as we have understood since the earliest days of the Enlightenment.
They mark the divide between fact and opinion, evidence and assertion, science and humbug.
That does not mean we look to science for absolute truth.
Doubt and uncertainty are part of knowledge, not separate from it.
The greater your expertise, the more qualified your scrutiny, the more chinks and inconsistencies you see.
Science does not dismiss those gaps – it probes them relentlessly.
But it does not hand out prizes for people who think they can fly.
It does not demand that we delay action until all doubt can be absolutely erased.
It asks only that we act in full knowledge of the best available evidence.
All progress comes with risks and benefits, and our choices have not always proven wise.
But few Australians would trade the opportunities they enjoy today for the conditions their parents took as given.
The microchips. The modern communications. The cancer cures. The chance to see the world, and change it for the better.
These were once the dreams of the wealthy. They are now the expectations of working people.
We are the custodians of that legacy – and we must have the courage to believe we too are capable of great things.
It seems there are many who lack that courage today.
We are living in an age where it seems increasingly fashionable to question not merely the evidence, but the very legitimacy of science itself.
Some would have us retreat to the caves of mediocrity, convinced we can be no better.
Others would choose the absolute conviction of radio shock jocks to the qualified doubts of scientists.
It is easy to trade on fear.
It is hard to invest in hope.
But that is the choice we must persuade our people to make, if we would be a nation fit for the twenty-first century.
I trust that this ceremony, and the phenomenal people it honours, will renew our commitment to that task.
We can be the place where the world excels – and the people who feel the benefits.
