Shouts from the desert

The first decade of the Howard government next month will no doubt be remarked upon as an economic success story. The national debt has been sharply reduced, and that decade has involved an uninterrupted stream of economic growth - even during periods when our major trading partners (including the United States) suffered set-backs and recession.

But as remarkable as the economic success has been, there has also been a remarkable failure to invest in the future. One part of this is obvious - the run-down of educational infrastructure that has gone a long way to unravelling Keating's "smart country" programs - but less obvious is the degree to which the Government has abandoned entirely projects directed to technological progress.

In the Hawke-Keating years the most notable of these projects were the poorly named and ill-fated Multi-Function-Polis - a project to build a high-tech city of the future to serve as a global prototype for clean, energy-efficient living in a new century, and the Cape York Spaceport. Admittedly neither of these went beyond planning stages, but now there are not even plans.

From the 1980s until now, computing and information technology have been the major drivers of economic advancement in developed nations, and Australia was able to participate in this. In the next two decades the major technological developments will centre around space travel. In the United States and Europe the development of space travel is being undertaken increasingly by private enterprise, but in Australia there is no such activity - and there is no such activity because our Government has made no attempt whatsoever to encourage such activity here.

This is hardly surprising - to my knowledge the Howard Government has never featured a Minister whose strengths lay in technology or the hard sciences. This is a striking omission when you consider the strategic importance of technology industries in our present economy and the share of the economy that technology industries represent. Technological development is not seen as a priority because we have a Cabinet that has precisely zero understanding of state-of-the-art technology now, let alone the general direction of technological progress.

If Australia is to remain economically competitive in the decades ahead, we need to be anticipating the technological trends and ensuring that we are in a position to take the maximum economic advantage from the opportunities that arise with new technologies. Failure to do so risks that by the higher standards of the future we will no longer be a developed country, and maybe not even a developing one.