COMMENT: Govt is pulling NZ out of a global science project with spin-offs for IT here - Derek McCormack

Reducing New Zealand's status in the Square Kilometre Array project from full to associate membership would be a backward step, Derek McCormack says. Photo / Richard Robinson

Opinion

There is a battle of opinion right now about the Square Kilometre Array, one of the biggest projects on the planet and one that New Zealand scientists and IT entrepreneurs have been deeply involved in for many years already.

But it costs money to stay at the table and in a time of competing budget priorities and rival agendas the debate is heating up. So let's look at the facts:

The aim of the Square Kilometre Array is to construct the world's largest radio telescope (made up of thousands of radio telescope dishes), to answer some of the biggest questions in science.

New Zealand is currently a full member of the project, which secures the opportunity for New Zealand scientists (for the next 50 years or more) to lead key parts of in an endeavour which has been described as spanning the broadest range of science in the world.

As well as being a mega-science project, the Square Kilometre Array is also the world's biggest ICT projects, encompassing big data science, high-performance computing and software engineering. In other words, beyond science, the major benefactor of New Zealand's involvement is our ICT sector and ultimately, through its innovation, the wider economy of skills, growth and jobs.

Despite this, early last year the Ministry of Business Innovation and Employment moved quickly to recommend to the new Government that it cuts New Zealand's financial contribution, by downgrading from full membership of the project to associate membership.

The trouble is, the terms of associate membership have not even been defined yet and the ministry admits the full members will likely keep all the important projects for themselves. This would lock New Zealand scientists and innovators out of this hard-won opportunity.

It has become clear that the membership decision is really about competing agendas and budget priorities. The ministry argues the likely annual cost of our contribution to the square kilometre array, $2.4m, is not a good science investment – ignoring the fact that figure will be offset significantly by guaranteed development, research and operational contracts.

The wider ICT benefits of New Zealand's ongoing participation – the ongoing software research involved in the construction and operational phases of the Square Kilometre Array – are ignored.

While it was hoped in the early stages that New Zealand would host some of the dishes that make up the array, previous officials in the ministry – and in its predecessor, the Ministry of Economic Development – had always understood the major benefits in terms of ICT and big data spill-over capacity.

Therefore, despite the 2012 decision to locate the dishes across southern Africa, the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment at the time promoted the establishment of the NZ SKA Alliance, a collaboration of universities and industry players that now includes AUT, University of Auckland, Massey University, Nyriad, Catalyst, Open Parallel and Compucon.

Back then, they could see that the square kilometre array opportunities represented huge potential for New Zealand scientists, innovators, engineers and entrepreneurs.

This is why NZ Alliance members have so far collectively invested between $8.5m and $10m, compared to the Government's investment of approximately $5m.

A short-sighted decision to downgrade New Zealand's membership would pull the rug out from underneath these New Zealand researchers, innovators and employers, depriving them – and the rest of us – of great opportunity.

We can do better than that.

* Derek McCormack is vice chancellor of AUT.