Hodgson Pete: Royal Society of New Zealand Amendment Bill — In Committee 
Hodgson Pete: Royal Society of New Zealand Amendment Bill — In Committee 
[Volume:672;Page:18384] 
Hon PETE HODGSON (Labour—Dunedin North) 
: 
 I am delighted to take part in this debate. I say to the member who has just resumed his seat Grant Robertson that I thought he gave an erudite introduction. I thought that for a man who has come to this bill only because the Royal Society is domiciled in the bailiwick he has the privilege to represent he gave a very good description of the legislation and briefly a history. Let me add my remarks. 
The Royal Society of New Zealand began partly because of a geological survey which itself had a bit to do with gold and partly because New Zealand was trying very hard to be as much like Britain as it could as soon as it could. A lot of that activity took place originally in Dunedin North which is the electorate I have the privilege of representing. The Royal Society formed in 1860-something—the member told me. 
Grant Robertson 
: In 1867. 
Hon PETE HODGSON 
: It formed in 1867 and has been going ever since. I would not say it has been going strongly ever since. It has fluctuated over the years as its fortunes have ebbed and flowed and its importance in society has fluctuated over the years. What happened to cut a long story short was that in the late 1980s the Lange - Palmer - Moore Government which was doing all sorts of things in society and was going through a restructuring phase restructured science. So the Department of Scientific and Industrial Research came up for disbandment. There are only three countries in the world that run science as per the Department of Scientific and Industrial Research model and they are New Zealand Australia and South Africa—the southern hemisphere colonies of mother England. We took out the Department of Scientific and Industrial Research and in a bipartisan approach which began under Tizard and Austin and finished under Minister Upton we moved into Crown research institutes. That is where we are now. 
While we were going through the stage of trying to create a bit of commercial drive on our science effort and trying to use a company model instead of a State department model in an effort to try to make sure that science moved more quickly into the community and was taken up in technology transfer intellectual property and that sort of thing we were also starting to wonder what was going to happen to the Royal Society. We did not know for quite a long time. Finally Minister Upton in the mid-1990s got his head around it and decided to do a bit of restructuring and that is where the 1997 legislation came from. But more important we as a country we as a Government we the polity if you will started interacting with the Royal Society in a much more consistent and enriched way than we ever had. We had ignored each other until then. 
These days the Royal Society is involved in delivering a range of programmes for the Minister of the day—whatever they may be. Normally the Royal Society does so extremely well. It gets involved in stuff on a one-off basis. I will give members an example: trying to work out how best to get the Performance-based Research Fund to work. The Royal Society was very very helpful. They were not just a bunch of stuffed shirts who were conservative bearded greying— 
Charles Chauvel 
: Cardigan-wearing. 
Hon PETE HODGSON 
: —cardigan-wearing hopelessly introverted scientists. That era has long past. It has long past but it did exist. Upton’s changes and the changes made by subsequent Governments have now meant that the Royal Society is a vital part of the mechanism of government as well as being the home of scientific method scientific thought rational thought or whatever we may like to call it. Both of those functions—as an institution and as a deliverer of services to Government—are now put in place and are pretty well settled. The Royal Society is a good outfit and it used not to be. 
When we rejigged science we did not know what to call the Ministry of Research Science and Technology so for almost 20 years we called it the Ministry of Research Science and Technology rather than the Ministry of Science and Technology. We wanted to let people know that not all research was science and technology but some research was—gosh what can we call it—scholarship. Then we would instance the humanities as an example. We took the sciences and started with the hard sciences of physics or whatever it might be; headed off towards the biological sciences which are the medium-soft sciences; then headed off to the very soft sciences such as political science but not as far as Scientology which is not a science. If members want to know what a science is and what a science is not I tell them that if it involves scientific method and trying to remove variables in order to better examine and observe things that have not been taken out or the things that remain then that is the essence of science. Scholarship—the study of a poet for example—has nothing to do with that. There is a very clear difference between sciences in their various forms and humanities. 
In the case of the humanities New Zealand has very little structure. We have a bunch of universities with humanities departments which is where the professionals lie where the PhDs are supervised and where the humanities flourish but beyond that we are not big enough to have this that or the other humanities societies. There are no great literary societies in New Zealand for example. There are some music societies but not many. There are some societies but humanities in general struggle in a smaller country. For that reason humanities are hard to organise. There is another reason which is that humanities are often done by amateurs by people who are retiring and writing a book about something that as likely as not is contributing to humanities. But they are doing so at their kitchen table so they are not likely to be easily organised. For all of those reasons the society of humanities has had difficulty getting off the ground. 
When I was Minister of Research Science and Technology between 1999 and 2005 I was repeatedly asked by humanities where their home was. We came to the view that we should test the Royal Society as a home. I stopped being the Minister in 2005 and they went off to begin what turned out to be a couple of years of discussion as to whether the humanities could be accommodated within the Royal Society structure. I returned to the portfolio for 1 year in 2008 only to find that it was all done and dusted. That is where this legislation has come from. I pay tribute to the tenacity of the people who have been leading humanities in New Zealand. I will not bother naming them. Perhaps I should name Neville Jordan who was president of the Royal Society at the time. He is the guy who in an earlier life started Marine Air Systems Technology and who in my view is the only serial entrepreneur in our New Zealand economic history so far. He is not a scientist; he is an engineer a technologist. He said the Royal Society could accommodate humanities. He did not see how the Royal Society could exclude anything. The society certainly could not exclude him as president because he is an engineer. The senior staff in the Royal Society equally embraced the idea and I acknowledge that. It is important to acknowledge that some people did not like it. It is important to try to understand that too. In the event having an academic home for humanities matters. That is why this legislation matters. I am delighted we are making some progress. 
I will say one last thing about clause 1 before I resume my seat. We cannot count. The bill’s title is the Royal Society of New Zealand Amendment Bill 2010. We will have to amend that. 
Grant Robertson 
: We will. 
Hon PETE HODGSON 
: We will will we? Can the member assure me that that is the case? Can it happen automatically? Perhaps it can. I hope so. Thank you.