My guess is that anyone who has some decades of face lines and has tried to get things going in Australia with ideas -------- is no stranger to that ---
it's bloody difficult to get support from pretty much anyone.
Keating summed it up really for me not long back - he said 'Australians are timid'
and by god, is that true++++++
It is one of the tragic wastes of Australia - why? Because Aussies have some kind of native talent for invention - they are just very very very good at it.
Hold my beer,
give us a bit of string, some fencing wire, a vice and a hammer - and Aussies will have a pretty serious go at a moonshot
BUT, there it stops. After that - no guts from business for support, no backing from venture capitalists, no government support
Indeed, governments over the decades have slashed and burned and cut to the bone and cut away the bone - research.
Why? - they totally confuse 'investment' and 'spending'
they have no concept that 'general research' has, at it's heart - 2 major characteristics -
* it burns money like there's no tomorrow and most of it - all you get is ash
* when it pays - it pays in spades and spades and spades
no guts, no glory
The problem is that Australia in general is a very conservative country - and when you have 'conservative' governments -------- to them, to watch doors of university general research rooms open and wheelbarrow after wheelbarrow of cash just get wheeled in and all you hear is weeks later calls for 'more money please' -
and no results -------------- visionless brains can't handle that
yet - out of those very rooms come the blockbusters, they take a long time coming, but when they come - you don't need wheelbarrows for the profit -
