It’s a privilege to stand here in the National Press Club on what are the unceded lands of the Ngunnawal People and to acknowledge the traditional custodians of the land across Australia that contain CSIRO’s 45 sites.
For 65,000 plus years Indigenous Australians have built the longest and I would argue the richest continuous culture.
You don’t flourish on this unpredictable continent without asking profound questions about the world around you.
You don’t flourish without answering those questions through observation and experimentation.
And you don’t flourish without communicating those answers across generations.
This is science, and indigenous science is not a thing of the past it is alive and it’s vibrant.
I want to celebrate the continuing contribution of Indigenous staff and board members to CSIRO and to Australian science.
I would especially like to thank and acknowledge Professor Alex Brown – a Yuin man, our longest-serving CSIRO Board member and director of the National Centre for Indigenous Genomics – for his wisdom, his generosity, and his mentorship.
Unlike our sportspeople, our musicians and our actors, scientists are seldom household names, so I will spend a very small amount of time explaining my background and how a life in science has shaped me and my view of Australia and its future.
What I will focus on in the rest of this address are the choices we need to make as the national science agency, as a research sector, and as a nation to position ourselves to embrace the opportunities that science provides as we tackle the profound challenges that confront us.
A little about me.
My parents emigrated from the UK in 1970 when I was 5 and my little brother was 3.
Their story is a typical immigrant story. For my father, it was about using his engineering qualifications to escape his working-class roots in northern England.
He and my mum saw Australia as a land of opportunity, where you could get ahead irrespective of class.
That was their reality.
Within a couple of years of arriving, they bought a house outside Melbourne.
One of my few memories of my father is of a man in awe of his luck, enchanted by the environment around him – especially the orchids, the birds and the butterflies.
My father’s death in 1975 is also an all too typical immigrant story - drowning in the surf, underestimating its power and overestimating his swimming ability.
My teenage years were a difficult blur, but in retrospect there were two life-changing moments.
First, as a 16-year-old, my wonderful year 12 biology teacher, Miss Holland – who I can now call Libby - gave me a lot of latitude and allowed me to obsess about the biochemistry of life: DNA, RNA and proteins.
Second, as a 19-year-old, I stumbled into working in a lab at the ANU over summer.
That lab worked on blood cells and the only way I can describe it is that it was like falling deeply in love.
To this day I still love the beauty and elegance and mystery of blood cells. They still move me as much today as they did when I first encountered them.
Although I have worked in science for 40 years, I have only worked in three places.
For 35 years I was at The Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research in Melbourne – researching blood cells.
For two years in the early 90s, I worked at MIT in Boston – again focussed on blood cells.
And in 2023, I joined CSIRO.
In each of those places, scientists did, and still do, remarkable things.
All three places are magnets for talent – drawing smart people from every country and culture – not homogenising them – but celebrating their difference - allowing them to achieve more together than they could individually.
Perhaps what is true for science is also true for nations.
Science has also taught me something else.
Discovery and progress are rarely made by following the same old comfortable path. Individuals, organisations and nations advance when they are willing to make choices, even if those choices are difficult.
I’ve told you how science has made a difference in my life. Now, let’s consider how it has made a difference in yours.
Over the past century, science has transformed the world. This year, as CSIRO turns 100, we can reflect on the role it has played - inventing technologies with global impact, as well as solving distinctly Australian problems.
Let me give you a few of examples.
When a mysterious illness emerged in Queensland in 1994, taking the life of a prominent horse trainer and more than a dozen horses, CSIRO researchers quickly identified what we now know as the Hendra virus.
In collaboration with researchers in the United States, they went on to help develop the vaccine that protects horses, and in doing so, protects the community.
In agriculture, CSIRO has partnered with Cotton Seed Distributors and the Cotton industry to develop the varieties that now underpin Australia's entire cotton crop.
This has been a four-decade program, which year-on-year continues to drive improvements in productivity and sustainability.
And, of course, the CSIRO classic – the foundation of modern WiFi.
With a combination of complex maths and radio astronomy expertise, we solved the puzzle of how to transmit large amounts of data, wirelessly, at high speeds and indoors overcoming obstacles like furniture.
Because of that, billions of people across the world now take high-speed WiFi for granted, using it in almost everything they do.
While very different, these three examples share key attributes:
Each began with an important, ambitious, and in some ways audacious, challenge.
Each brought together talented teams to solve the problem.
Each team was focussed and each delivered impact at scale.
The question today is whether we can bring the same attributes – audacity, collaboration and focus - not just to the science and technology we do, but also to our national ambition and aspiration.
Some of the challenges that we need to tackle are ones that will be obvious to you.
Some of them have been discussed before in this forum.
Australia’s productivity growth has been subdued for decades, and our economy is among the least diverse in the world. Yet, we have incredible natural resources and an opportunity to move further up the value chain – from iron ore to green steel and from critical minerals to clean critical materials.
But this won’t happen by chance.
Nor will our success in navigating the rise of AI.
We are being drawn to AI, like sailors to the Sirens.
AI has the potential to super-charge productivity and open incredible possibilities that were difficult to imagine only a few years ago. But in the process, it could dash the very things we value on the rocks.
We cannot simply lash ourselves to the mast or fill our ears with beeswax.
We must chart a course that builds Australian capability and resilience, using Australian data for Australian benefit, all the while protecting what we value most – human creativity and social cohesion.
An equally significant challenge is the precarious global order.
In a more uncertain world, supply chains are more fragile, technological advantage is being wielded ever more openly as a tool of power, and we are being forced to think differently about sovereign science and technology, biosecurity and Australia’s place in the world.
And casting a shadow over all of this is climate change.
Every person in every country – no matter its government - is living the reality, not the threat, of a one and a half degree rise in temperature with further increases almost inevitable.
We must build an electricity system that is clean, reliable and affordable, and decarbonise other parts of our economy.
We must understand and protect our environment and precious biodiversity before we lose what makes Australia such a special place.
None of these challenges will resolve themselves and, in each case, science plays a crucial role in their solution.
To tackle these challenges with verve requires we make choices.
Perhaps every era seems momentous to those living it, but the choices we make now do feel incredibly consequential.
As an organisation, as a research sector, and as a nation, it feels as if we are standing at a junction.
Just picture it for a moment.
There are three possible paths from which to choose.
Two, in some ways, are easy, even comfortable, choices.
The first option is to avoid the choice and continue in the same direction assuming things will get better despite all the evidence.
The second option is incredibly enticing but equally ineffective.
That choice is to backtrack, longing for a time when things were simpler and easier, despite the world becoming increasingly complex and difficult.
The third path is the hard path. But the right path.
Chart a new course into unfamiliar terrain.
To do this we will need to make uncomfortable, sometimes invidious, decisions that will impact the way we work, the things we value and the communities of which we are a part.
Over the past two years the difficult choices we have made at CSIRO have been scrutinized – as they should be – in the media, the research sector and by our elected representatives.
But before I explain where we need to go from here – the path we need to take – it is important to look at how we arrived at this point.
And that means understanding a little about how CSIRO works and the pressures on the organisation that have accumulated over decades.
CSIRO's core funding comes from the Federal Government via an annual appropriation of around 1 billion dollars.
That is a significant public investment, and we are entrusted to use it to fulfil our legislative purpose which is conveniently laid out in our Act – The SIR Act, of 1949.
It might sound strange, but I refer to the SIR Act often. It’s CSIRO's reason for existence and as we make choices, it is our bedrock.
Our primary responsibilities under this Act are surprisingly simple.
Carry out scientific research and deploy the results of that research for three ends:
One. To assist Australian industry,
Two. To further the interests of the Australian community,
And three. To support the achievement of national objectives, including our obligations under the Paris Convention.
What the Act doesn’t tell us is what science to do, or which industries or communities or national objectives to prioritise.
Those choices – are in the main – left to CSIRO.
As anyone who has spent time travelling across Australia knows, what serves a community in inner Melbourne, might be very different to what improves lives in remote areas of the Northern Territory.
The responsibility of leadership is not to avoid choices – it is to make them thoughtfully and transparently.
One lens we take to making those choices at CSIRO is whether we can achieve impact for industry, the community and the nation at scale.
The questions we ask are:
Is the science we are doing capable of assisting an entire industry, not just one company?
Will it further the interests of communities across an entire region, a state or the whole country or just one town?
Will the science we do help change the national trajectory or will it just lead to incremental benefit?
Our science must also deliver impact across three-time frames:
We must be nimble enough to respond to acute national crises – like the pandemic or supply chain disruptions;
We must be committed to delivering on medium term government and national priorities;
And we must be steadfast enough to work on long-term transgenerational challenges like productivity and climate change.
Balancing those timeframes again means making choices.
Irrespective of the timeframe, to deliver real benefit, we almost always need to collaborate with partners in industry, in government and in universities.
And that often means co-investment - bringing together the skills, expertise and resources needed to tackle problems that no single organisation can solve alone.
Co-investment is a double-edged sword at CSIRO. It allows us to be the scale that we are and can be a powerful force for generating more impact more quickly, but extra funding – for its own sake - can become a distraction if it pulls us away from our core purpose, rather than help us fulfil it.
When I arrived at CSIRO as Chief Executive in 2023, it was clear we had choices to make beyond how we deliver on our legislative scientific responsibilities.
CSIRO was facing a profound sustainability crisis that had been building for 50 years, and the response could no longer be deferred.
We were constrained by several factors: funding and a capital budget that had not kept pace with inflation; ageing and sprawling infrastructure; and the rapidly escalating cost of doing science.
Successive generations of CSIRO leaders had made difficult choices.
These choices have included reducing the number of sites we operate on from 106 in the 1990s to 45 now.
The spread of those sites remains one of CSIROs key strengths. They connect science to our dispersed and disparate communities across every state and territory, and are one reason CSIRO continues to be privileged with high levels of public trust.
Yet, they also come with significant costs.
By the end of 2025, we faced a sobering backlog of essential repairs and maintenance that had accumulated to a scale that could no longer be managed.
More than 80 per cent of our 800 buildings were at their technical end-of-life and were no longer fit-for-purpose.
We faced an agonising choice.
We could continue along the same path and spread our resources ever more thinly.
Or we could make difficult decisions to focus our efforts and then reinvest in CSIRO’s foundations to enable staff to continue to work safely, securely and at the cutting edge to deliver impact for Australia for the decades to come.
After holistically reviewing all our science for the first time in many years, we made the choice to exit some areas of science and narrow our focus in others rather than “tip-pruning” everything and running the risk of doing nothing at scale.
These important decisions were not made lightly, quickly or by any one individual.
They were informed by the collective expertise of our research leaders and constructive, frank and fearless advice from external experts.
That rigorous process helped us identify where CSIRO could focus its efforts to deliver the greatest impact for the nation, but it did not make the resulting choices easy.
It has meant saying no to some great ideas.
It has meant scaling back or stopping work that talented people have devoted their careers to and care deeply about.
It has had a profound impact on staff, their teams and their families.
Those impacts are real and cannot be underestimated.
Despite these difficult choices, what fills me with incredible optimism is that CSIRO is full of researchers with passion, creativity and conviction.
We have people from every conceivable background, with diverse skills and at every stage of their careers who are motivated by improving the world around them.
If we can provide them with safe, secure and cutting-edge facilities, they will succeed.
What also fills me with optimism is that we have a Minister and Government that recognises the critical role of science and technology in Australia’s future.
They commissioned the Ambitious Australia report and despite incredibly difficult economic times, have provided CSIRO crucial additional funding.
233 million dollars in MYEFO and 387 million dollars in the last budget - which places us, for the first time in decades, on a path to revitalising CSIRO.
We can begin well overdue repairs and maintenance, invest in our ageing IT systems, and renew scientific equipment.
We are also beginning major upgrades to nationally significant facilities, including an approximately 1-billion-dollar refit of the Australian Centre for Disease Preparedness in Geelong, which plays such a central role in protecting Australia from catastrophic disease threats, including the H5N1 bird flu that has reached our shores.
Just as importantly, this funding allows us to provide greater stability to CSIROs people.
Given a focus on impact, given increased stability and given the facilities they need to do their best work, I am incredibly optimistic they can do the science that will change the country for the better.
I have spoken a lot about CSIRO – but the challenges we face are not unique.
Across Australia and around the world, research organisations are grappling with rising costs, constrained budgets and growing expectations.
Governments are making difficult budget choices as they balance cost-of-living challenges facing their citizens, defence and sovereign capability as global precarity intensifies, and, in many parts of the developed world, the demands of looking after a rapidly ageing population.
As we have already discussed, science is a crucial ingredient in solving major national and global problems.
The question I ask myself is; as a sector are we are operating today in a manner that justifies greater support tomorrow?
The answer, I think, is that we can do better with the resources already entrusted to us.
The Ambitious Australia report (and many reports before that) provide a series of recommendations that speak to this.
I think there are three critical elements: Focus, Collaboration and Accountability
I have spoken about the challenge of focus - a challenge that exists not just at CSIRO, but across the broader research system.
As Glyn Davis has repeatedly articulated, we need institutions that are clearer about their strengths and willing to differentiate themselves.
As well as focussing, I also think the community expects that researchers and the institutions in which they work, will collaborate to solve the big national challenges.
Australia has some great examples of collaborations that have delivered incredible national benefits. However, this is far from embedded or reflexive.
Some of the barriers to collaboration are cultural; others are structural:
At CSIRO we want to be part of a system that is collaborative by nature, in which funding brings teams together across the sector rather than driving them apart. And where programs spanning fundamental science through to application are aligned to the national interest.
In terms of accountability, we must go beyond reporting to government and funding agencies, important though that is. We must retain and build the trust of the communities we serve. All of them.
We cannot ask the Australian public to choose science, if science is not always willing to engage with the Australian public.
Elsewhere, science has become increasingly self-referential and disconnected from parts of society.
Treating sections of the community with disdain because they either don’t understand or are distrustful of science has predictable consequences and we are seeing these play out in other parts of the world.
Where science improves lives, we have a responsibility to explain that impact clearly, consistently and in ways that connect with people wherever they are.
When science is less directly practical in its benefit, we must work even harder to explain why it matters.
At our best, I think we do this well at CSIRO.
I love the work of our researchers who are partnering with farmers to understand and manage the rodent plagues that regularly devastate our rural areas.
They don’t just use traditional and social media to communicate their message. They engage face-to-face with communities in halls across regional Australia – listening, explaining and treating communication as a core part of being a scientist.
Science continues to make a profound difference in the world. However, we must redouble our effort to communicate that difference to the communities – all the communities – that we serve. We must be more accountable.
If we can be more focussed, more collaborative and more accountable in the work we do, then the choice for the community and its elected representatives to invest in, partner with and support science … will become more compelling, perhaps even irresistible.
As a nation I think there are powerful reasons for making that choice.
Working in modern facilities, with audacity and ambition and collaborating with partners across the country – with focus and accountability – just imagine, for a moment, what we could achieve together in the next decade or two.
Imagine future generations looking back on this decade, as the moment Australia decided that curiosity, ambition and audacity were our greatest national assets.
Imagine an Australia powered by abundant, affordable, and reliable clean energy where households pay less, businesses compete globally, and entirely new industries emerge in the Hunter, in Gippsland, in Gladstone and in Collie, because energy is no longer a constraint but one of our greatest advantages.
Imagine the minerals so essential for the world's batteries, magnets and electronics coming out of the ground in Australia stayed here long enough to become something refined. Processed and built into the technologies of the next fifty years.
Imagine knowing our oceans as well as we know our land. Able to protect the species we treasure, sustainably feed a growing population, support thriving industries – all while safeguarding one of Australia's greatest natural advantages for generations to come.
Imagine redesigning crops and farming systems so our agricultural communities can thrive in the climatic conditions of the future – more severe frosts, less predictable rains and drier conditions - while producing more food, using fewer resources.
Imagine having a DNA library of every plant and animal on our continent and coupling this technology with autonomous systems to allow us to monitor biodiversity rapidly and at scale.
Imagine using this system to accelerate environmental approvals for important projects, identify and conserve endangered species and detect invasive species as soon as they arrive allowing us to eradicate them before they become established.
Imagine AI accelerating discovery by drawing insights from across a wide range of disciplines and datasets all at once; helping solve complex problems that no single discipline could solve alone.
Imagine developing Australian foundation models using Australian data for Australian benefit.
Imagine learning from Indigenous people and their 65,000 years of experience, their knowledge creation, their survival. And flourishing and weaving this together with emerging technologies.
Imagine what it would mean for our science, for our understanding of the world, and for our health, wellbeing and prosperity?
In a world that can feel like it’s running out of wonder, imagine discovering there’s more of it here – in Australia - than anyone realised.
These scenarios may seem far-fetched, but these are exactly the audacious and ambitious goals our teams at CSIRO, with collaborators, are working towards.
How successful they will be will depend on the choices we make.
The central message I want to leave you with today is simple.
Australia faces extraordinary challenges and extraordinary opportunities.
Success in tackling them and success in seizing them won’t happen by chance – but it will happen if we make the right choices.
Choices about the investments we make and the priorities we set - the things we are prepared to stop doing, so we can focus on what matters most.
At CSIRO we have been confronting our challenges directly and seizing our opportunities with both hands.
The greatest risk for CSIRO was not making the wrong decision; it was making no decision.
The same is true for the innovation sector.
The same is true for the nation.
More than 40 years ago, I walked into a laboratory and fell in love. I found a community of people who wanted to use their skills and talent to improve the world.
Today, I see across CSIRO – and across the science sector – the same things that inspired me all those years ago.
We have young people coming through school and university who do want to devote their lives to solve the big problems we all face.
We have smart scientists from across the world bringing their talent to research teams across Australia.
The choices we are making now will create the conditions for these teams to do their best work for decades to come.
If we make the right choices, we can build a future where Australia is more productive, more resilient, more sustainable and more united.
A future where science is trusted, used, challenged and supported. Because people can see the difference it makes in their lives and in our national life.
That is a future worth choosing.