Australia’s Strategic Examination of Research and Development explained what is wrong with the national R&D system, why reform is needed and how the system could be fixed. It did not explain how its recommendations would be implemented. In this new book, John H Howard examines how the SERD review lost its way and identifies the institutional machinery required to turn diagnosis into durable reform.

When Senator Tim Ayres speaks of resilience, he means the capacity to keep functioning when the world does not cooperate, anchored in a robust industrial base. This Insight places that reading at the centre of the post-2020 turn in industrial policy and asks how it works alongside productivity and competitiveness. The answer lies in design: resilience investments that supply the complements firms need, and capabilities kept at home that also differentiate Australia in interna

Has resilience displaced innovation as the organising idea in Australia’s science, technology and innovation policy? Guest writer Rajesh Gopalakrishnan Nair suggests the proposed Resilience and Science Council marks this policy turn. In this extended essay, Rajesh traces the resilience narrative from Federation to the present and argues that the neoclassical reading of resilience, a bounce back to equilibrium, may cost Australia the innovation policy that Ambitious Australia