Science Meets Parliament

Ms VLAHOS (Taylor) (15:32): I would like to speak about an event that was held in the South Australian parliament last night. It was the concluding one of a series we have held in 2017, and it involves Science Meets Parliament. Last night, we had the honour of hosting two former NASA astronauts in the building: Dr Andy Thomas AO and Colonel Pam Melroy. We also had the opportunity to speak to several astroscientists: Dr Alex Grant, Chief Executive Officer of Myriota; Michael Davis, Chair of the Space Industry Association and Chair of the IAC 2017 Local Organising Committee, which is holding a very large convention at the new Convention Centre; and Dr Andrew Seedhouse, Chief of National Security and Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance Division of the DST Group.

It was fascinating to hear Dr Thomas speak about the establishment of the Australian space agency, which was announced this week. It was heralded at a recent CEDA lunch I attended today as an incredibly important step forward, as we were the last OECD country to form an agency in this space. South Australia is well positioned to benefit from this agency and to support local businesses to participate in the growing space industry and space projects in our state, particularly taking advantage of the Woomera space that has long been at the heart of many of the defence projects in our state.

It was fascinating to hear Colonel Pam Melroy talk to us about her journey from being a US Air Force pilot, joining in 1983, to most recently coming from her time at DARPA, which involved intellectualising science and big ideas across government and how we commercialise them into government and a variety of other spaces that are exciting, whether it is satellites for weather or for data processing. The potential we have now, moving into the space economy is very important, as we commercialise space and not just leave it as a government response.

It was fantastic, as well, to hear Dr Seedhouse talk about how the space domain will provide critical capabilities to the ADF and Defence but also to the burgeoning new space era of commercialisation, and about how our South Australian universities, that do support Science Meets Parliament—as in Flinders University, UniSA and Adelaide University—will be working in this area, alongside people in the space industry, to develop our capabilities as a state.

Most importantly, at the end it was wonderful to hear Michael Davis, who is the chair of the Space Industry Association, welcome to this parliament fellow international parliamentarians who had come together over the weekend to talk about space law, space entrepreneurship—or 'astropreneurship', as it is being spoken of—and about how we can work, as legislators across the globe, to ensure that this space is governed in a fair and just way, as we would expect any of our international global obligations to be met.