Professor Philip Nolan:

It is absolutely about balance. The Minister needs to be empowered to consider the full range of skills. We need people who understand how research is done and how research careers flourish and develop. We also need people who understand how research is applied in industry, the public service or civil society and we need people who represent the broad interests of society to say that, for example, specific research on sustainability is important. We need to push the agency to be focused on those kinds of things. A diversity of views makes for good governance in this setting, as well as in other settings. There also needs to be an understanding of how the system works while at the same time being sufficiently distant from the system that there is no conflict of interest.