Hon Jim Anderton

Opposition spokesman on Agriculture
Progressive Party leader
MP for Wigram

10 March 2009 Media statement

NZ has choice to make on science

Whether New Zealand becomes a more science-based economy is as much of a choice as a decision about knighthoods, Progressive Wigram MP Jim Anderton said tonight at the launch of a new book about transforming New Zealand’s economy.

From Wool to Weta, by Professor Paul Callaghan is a series of conversations with New Zealand’s innovators.

Jim Anderton says New Zealand has been making choices against science in the last three months.

“A two billion public-private partnership in scientific research called New Zealand Fast Forward has been cancelled. That wiped out the largest single investment in science ever made in this country. A tax credit for research and development worth a billion dollars over three years was canceled. That was the largest business tax increase in our history.

“All this took place without much of a squeak - specifically from the business community itself.

“Just as half of our exports used to come from wool, and most of our export earnings from a single country, today wool’s proportion of everything we earn overseas has fallen to just two per cent. And though there are some in New Zealand who are clinging to the vestiges of our ancient British past, we are becoming a different a culture too. Change seems always to come with a couple of steps forward and one or two back.

“Uncomfortable as it is for many people - especially in business - Support for science has become a fault line between differing political philosophies.

“There was a very public example of this divide between pro- and anti-science politics only this morning in the United States. President Obama this morning signed a law allowing stem cell research to proceed in the US. At his press conference he repudiated the previous President’s opposition to stem cell research in the US, saying the distinction between science and morality in this case was false.”

ENDS

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