Professor Jim Livesey:

The question the Senator has asked pushes in the right direction because we need to be thinking about the future. If we were simply rearranging our current funding, it would not be worth time of day. This very much has to be transformative. I genuinely believe that we can achieve an "all of the above" outcome. Of course we have to contribute to the economic function of the country but the research is always international and the tasks we face extend well beyond the economy.

When I read the heads of the Bill I thought that this was not a bad place to start. Keep it simple but how we integrate and create platforms which are capable of mobilising multifunctional teams dealing with wicked and complex problem such as those attendant on the digital green transitions, for instance, cannot be done by us now. The agency can only fund that, but it can create the context where the creative people we all know and with whom we work every day are enabled to do that.

At the moment we are little bit hunched over where we are asking that our last 5p is not taken away from us but I believe once we turn it back out the other way, we will be looking to show what we can do.

Having said that, with the dynamic that gets going between innovation - and not just economic innovation but cultural and social innovation as well - and the research tasks, where stakeholders posit problems that move back into the research system and come back out then as provocations to change, which are often quite challenging because research is disruptive and is not cuddling, I believe we can very much achieve amazing things.

Some of the things which look like either-ors turn out actually to be mutually dependent.