Hutchison Paul: Estimates Debate — In Committee 
Hutchison Paul: Estimates Debate — In Committee 
[Volume:640;Page:10417] 
Dr PAUL HUTCHISON (National—Port Waikato) 
: 
 It gives me great pleasure to speak on this vote. I believe that it is a very very important vote as was suggested by the Government back in 2005. This year the vote for the non-departmental budget was $644 million but in 2005 in the Speech from the Throne the Governor-General said that science innovation research and development was critical to economic growth in New Zealand. What was extraordinary was that in the next Budget $1 billion—probably $1.5 billion—was put into the Working for Families project which is a project that will cement in welfare dependency in New Zealand; another $1 billion was put into interest-free student loans which will also cement in welfare dependency; and a mere $19.4 million was put into science research and development. So on the one hand the Labour Government was saying that research science and technology were critical to economic growth but on the other hand it was doing very little in that area. 
What we do know is that right throughout the tenure of the Labour Government investment into research science and technology as a percentage of GDP has remained the same at about 0.55 percent of GDP when the OECD average is about 0.68 percent. The Minister might be sitting there thinking: “Ah but this year we have invested through one of the other portfolios a significant tax credit to stimulate the private sector.” but Labour has not done the fundamentals—that is to ensure that we have a simple low-tax system to ensure that we have a flexible labour market and an optimal regulatory system. That is just as important in science research and development as it is in anything else. Both the Agricultural Compounds and Veterinary Medicines Act and the Hazardous Substances and New Organisms Act need review as scientists up and down the country are saying that there are blockages to their research or to their efforts to commercialise projects because of difficulties with those two Acts. There is no doubt that the whole regime right from the very beginning—from basic research to commercialisation of science—is not operating optimally under this Government. 
One of the things I particularly wanted to talk about is the huge compliance costs imposed on scientists in New Zealand at this time. A couple of weeks ago Professor Jacqueline Rowarth who is a professor at Massey University wrote how bureaucrats are taking a bigger slice of the research budget. She reported how Neville Jordan the President of the Royal Society of New Zealand had noted in her words that 60 percent of funding was being eaten up by the system. In actual fact I do not think it was quite as much as that but certainly the figures were a substantial amount. The Ministry of Research Science and Technology and the Foundation for Research Science and Technology both say that their compliance costs are less than 3 percent but it is the researchers themselves who are having to undergo enormous work to get a successful application through and it is there that the costs are taking place. 
There is no doubt that the system as designed by Labour in the last 6 to 7 years is as the Minister admits extremely inefficient. We should have a situation where the Ministry of Research Science and Technology is a clear policy body and the Foundation for Research Science and Technology is an efficient lean funder whereby compliance costs are kept to an absolute minimum. Yet in this country we have the reality of extraordinary compliance costs imposed on our researchers right throughout the country. 
It is not only in the field of Crown research institutes and universities; we have just seen the fiasco with the centres of research excellence whereby under this Government only one new centre of research excellence was awarded tenure—I am not sure whether it was for 5 or 6 years—but only one centre out of 26 received this award. It was regarded as an absolute fiasco by the Otago University vice-chancellor Professor David Skegg. The next in line Professor White said that the weakness was in the process used to make the core selection that much of the process was confused and that aspects of the selection framework left them concerned. What I really think is that these are all examples of how this Labour Government has left us with huge compliance costs and inefficiencies in an area critical to our economy an area that the Government itself has admitted is important yet it has failed miserably. 
Vote agreed to.