Policies/Education and Innovation

=Education and innovation=

Schools and early education
Education is a powerful determinant of well-being. It is a source of wealth, a provider of life skills, an enabler of participation, and a core component of civil society. The 2000 Dakar World Education Conference noted that all young people have the right to an education that includes “learning to know, to do, to live together and to be".

Early childhood education

Pirate Party Australia supports trials in Australia of the childcare cooperative system used successfully overseas. A co-op system will provide a means for willing parents to combine resources and provide low-cost or free childcare by taking turns as carers and volunteers. It also provides social opportunities to new families and their children, and reduces demand pressure on the existing childcare system.

School education

Global comparisons suggest that the world's best educational system is in Finland. Unlike Australia, where funding is shredded between public and private systems, Finland focuses on a single system of locally controlled public schools. Teachers have great autonomy, and educators have freedom to mix and combine classes, test when and how they wish, teach in different ways to accommodate different learning styles, and bring in additional support and resources as needed. Unsurprisingly, this kind of autonomy encourages many more highly qualified and bright people into the teaching profession, and solves many issues of teacher quality experienced in other countries.

Australia is one of the few countries to divide its funding between public and private systems. This is the wrong path in the long term. The diversion of public funding to private and religious schools does not promote equity; it merely leads to scarce resources being allocated where they aren't needed. It doesn't promote diversity: diversity is actually reduced when children are segregated along religious and socio-economic lines. It doesn't promote choice: the shift in funding towards private schools has left entire leaving entire postcodes lacking any comprehensive public schooling. It doesn't improve value for money: a huge increase in private funding has seen relatively small shifts in student numbers, and where students have shifted, the largest impact has been to concentrate poorer students into the increasingly under-funded public system. And it clearly hasn't improved educational standards: basic science teaching is regularly undermined in religious schools and overall educational outcomes for Australian children have been falling relentlessly in recent years, especially among the most disadvantaged.

A shift towards global best practice need not cost any more money. However, we believe a future education system should have the following features:


 * Funding should be reserved for schools which are secular and free, and available to every child.
 * Schools should be locally controlled. Standardised testing should be optional, teachers should be more empowered, and curriculums should be leaner, with more time available for school-determined content.
 * Additional funding should be available to address disadvantage and improve educational diversity. Schools in poor areas should receive additional resources, and all schools should be able to 'bulk bill' activities in which qualified experts are engaged to teach in areas of interest chosen by students and parents.

Pirate Party Australia advocates the following reforms:

Improve provision of community based childcare
 * Provide certification processes and a one-stop information service for the setup of childcare cooperatives.

Foster well-funded, dynamic and secular public schools
 * Reallocate federal education funding:
 * Progressively reallocate funding towards free and secular schools, with allowance for other schools to transfer or sell land and assets into the public system.
 * Abolish the school chaplains program.
 * Ensure sufficient funding is available to implement Gonski recommendations on additional support for poor and disadvantaged schools.
 * Change school accountability frameworks:
 * Abolish existing paperwork accountability systems and provide schools with control over finances including management of bank accounts and purchases.
 * Support the establishment of principal networks to encourage the spread of effective systems.
 * Allow students 16 and over to transfer to TAFE and have per-student funding follow them.
 * Trial a bulk billing scheme for extracurricular activities including tutoring from outside experts in areas determined by students and parents.
 * Provide more support to teachers:
 * Ensure trainee teachers receive a minimum of 12 weeks supported classroom time.
 * Allow ongoing salary progression for teachers with more than 10 years of experience.
 * Include a solid foundation of life skills and personal development within the National Curriculum:
 * Grades 1-4 to cover behaviour towards others, people skills, and exploration of science and critical thinking;
 * Grades 5-6 to develop earlier material and additionally cover sex education, conflict resolution, and ethics;
 * Grades 7-8 to develop earlier material and additionally cover accidents and emergency response, civics and voting, budgeting, basic IT skills, careers and starting a business.
 * Limit compulsory subjects to life skills, maths, science and English.
 * Abolish Special Religious Instruction in public schools and limit religious study to comparative religion in the context of history, culture and literature.
 * Endorse the right of schools to access Safe Schools education programmes.
 * Extend the Safe Schools programme by bringing in Safe Schools representatives to engage with recurring bullying problems and the individual students involved.

Universities
Tertiary education is crucial for our shift towards a more knowledge-based economy. While student numbers continue to rise, growing evidence exists of a troubling deterioration in standards and academic morale in universities. Approximately half of academics have been assessed to be at risk of psychological illness due to insecurity and overwork, while two thirds believe academic freedom is being curtailed. Higher education has suffered from efforts by successive governments to force it into a top-down, corporatist structure. This is an inappropriate form for an education system and a driver of stultification and surveillance. The drive towards pseudo-measurement of educational outcomes has also imposed unprecedented administrative costs, with administrators and managers now outnumbering academics.

Much of this change is demonstrably counter-productive. The narrow emphasis on vocational education is creating graduates unfit for many jobs - employers have raised issues with serious deficits in team work, creative thought and communication. Administrative burdens imposed in the name of quality assurance are driving down quality by drawing resources out of teaching and research. Attempts to quantify educational outputs obscure more than they reveal. And the lowering of standards to accommodate overseas students is reducing Australia’s attractiveness as an international student destination.

Genuine transparency means accountability to the general public, not to a corporate structure. We believe that publicly funded academic research should be made freely available to the public and no longer locked up behind publisher paywalls. We also believe in enhancing the quality of academic work by following the advice of academics themselves, who urgently seek higher per-student funding and greater autonomy. We will also encourage the current shift towards digital education, which is proving to be a crucial aid for the poor, for people in remote locations, and for carers and people with disabilities.

Education should be seen as a pillar of civil society rather than a money making commodity, and campuses should be encouraged to play a greater role in the community. Passion, curiosity and freedom to speak and question are key curbs to unhindered power, and a successful university system should embody those traits.

Pirate Party Australia advocates the following reforms:

Support academic autonomy in tertiary institutions
 * Impose benchmarks to guarantee the use of public funds for academic salaries, teaching material and research.
 * Expand full-time academic positions targeting a maximum student-teacher ratio of 20:1.
 * Guarantee study leave, research time, and fieldwork in academic contracts.
 * Restore academic control over course and research funding, course design & outcomes, unit guides, marking, workload allocation, hiring, and teaching choices.
 * Defund administrative functions and organisations associated with monitoring, surveillance, government reviews and data collection.
 * Abolish standardising and rigid templates.
 * Abolish code of conduct restrictions on academic speech.
 * Limit the Tertiary Education Quality and Standards Agency to an advisory role.

Increase educational resourcing and outputs
 * Provide $4 billion per year to properly resource higher education research and increase grant acceptance (see Science plan policy for details)
 * $500 million per year should be set aside to support a 25 per cent increase in base per-student funding.
 * Ensure a portion of this funding is directed to restoring access and equity measures for poorer students, as well as provision of counselling and childcare services.
 * Replace the lifetime FEE-HELP limit with a maximum loan cap, offset by repayments.
 * Institute Open Access provisions for publicly funded academic, peer-reviewed, journal articles produced within universities.
 * Make all articles freely available to the public without paywalls or publisher restrictions.
 * Promote increased use of campuses for community seminars, live events and public debates.
 * Increase provision of free online courses, and encourage greater use of online infrastructure to reduce course costs and improve budget sustainability.
 * Encourage greater course-driven interaction between students and businesses or community groups.
 * Apply full whistle-blower protections to users of Unileaks and similar outlets.

A streamlined patent system
Patents grant an individual or a business a temporary monopoly over the expression of an idea. Patents are a powerful legal instrument which grant their holder a right to stop others from using a product or an idea for up to 20 years.

Patents are meant to encourage innovation. However, as time passes they are increasingly doing the opposite, becoming a means for old, legacy businesses to prevent competition and stifle innovative rivals through endless legal action. With uncountable millions of patents now lodged, real inventors face a minefield of potential obstacles in bringing any new product to market. Serious reform is needed to being the patent system back to its core purpose.

General reforms

The original twenty-year patent duration was set down at a time when ideas and products took years to spread, and most research suggests a significantly briefer term is better in a world where products can be built and marketed to millions in a space of weeks. As patents are an intervention by the state in the free market, their existence can only be justified where there is a clear benefit to the public interest. Accordingly, no avenues should exist for the use patents to block publicly funded research. Additionally, since patents were introduced to support development of products, any legal defence of a patent should require proof on the part of the litigant that the patent in question is being actively used.

Pirate Party Australia also believes the patent system needs to include accommodations to allow independent development of the same invention.

Software patents

The software industry is uniquely dynamic, and patent durations on software should be shorter than those applying to other patent types. Pirate Party Australia would abolish functional claiming (which patents the end result of software) as it removes the ability of the free market to create newer and better approaches. We also believe a larger fee should apply for software patents in order to fund additional scrutiny and a raising of the threshold for obviousness and prior art.

Genes and organisms

“Products of nature” were not patentable under the original terms of patent law. However, the scope of patent law has crept, and patents on human genes are now granted on the grounds that extraction of material from its natural environment is akin to having “invented” it. This is a nonsensical legal artifice which, if applied in other fields, would lead to patents on coal, cotton, and wood.

It is also a particularly harmful form of corporate welfare. Gene patents are effectively a state-granted right to lock away fundamental information about our bodies. Gene patents hinder research by forcing scientists to negotiate among dozens of gene patent holders, who bear no obligation to contribute to research themselves. Gene patents also lead to huge costs being imposed on sick and dying patients for simple tests and treatments.

Patents on living and genetic material represent a net loss for society, and should no longer be recognised.

Pharmaceutical patents

Patents on drugs are justified as a necessary incentive for medical research. In practice, however, patents are an incredibly poor mechanism for this. Most of the money extracted by patent rents does not fund research at all: instead, it is directed towards marketing and corporate expenses. To the extent that patents do fund research, the incentive is to develop temporary fixes which can be sold over and over rather than real cures, which can be sold only once. Only around two per cent of new active ingredients and applications devised by drug companies are considered to make real medical progress.

For these dubious benefits, drug patents impose a massive cost. Monopoly power allows firms to charge huge prices for drugs whose actual production cost is minuscule. More than $10 billion is spent each year on the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme (PBS), most of which goes into meeting patent rents so that drugs are affordable. High drug prices also deny lifesaving medicines to the world's poor.

If drug patents were no longer recognised, monopolies on drugs would cease and domestic drug prices would fall to cents in the dollar. Market competition would force domestic firms to compete on quality, and future aid could include exports of critical drugs to poor countries. Our public health system would be freed from a huge cost burden, and current spending on the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme could be redirected to sponsor genuine drug research and bring about a renaissance for science in Australia.

Private drug research should still be encouraged, but not through a patent system. Instead, funding should be made available to trial a ‘bounty’ system, under which rewards are offered for the creation of drugs which serve an identified public good. Bounties would be paid out on cures, not temporary fixes, and drugs on which a bounty has been paid would immediately enter the public domain. Ultimately, the best path forward would be for willing countries to sign a new global biomedical treaty to enact a global bounty system, which could direct hundreds of billions of dollars a year into critical medical research.

Declared Value System

The patent system should reflect the potential public benefit of ending a patent monopoly, and provide that option via a market system. A balanced approach is to use a Declared Value System, whereby the patent holder must declare a liberation value for their patent. If another party (including the government) were willing to pay to permanently abolish the patent, the patent holder would receive the liberation value as compensation. The patent registration fees would be set as a percentage of the liberation value (e.g. 0.2% p.a) and could be escalated over time. Patent holders could adjust their liberation value in response to buy-out offers, provided they pay the difference in fees from the previous value. This system would make it unprofitable to sit idly on patents, or to buy up large amounts of patents to stifle competition. Consequently, the allocation efficiency of patent monopolies would be improved. This ensures that the public receives a fair proportion of the monopoly rents created by the patent, innovators are rewarded, useful patents are more successfully commercialised, and monopolies reflect a true cost to the market. To offset the potential cost escalation on small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) of higher patent fees, additional revenue could be hypothecated into SME legal aid to reduce legal costs of defending against patent challenges and breach of patent.

Pirate Party Australia advocates the following reforms:

Reduce patent quantity, and increase quality
 * Reduce patent duration to 10 years.
 * Require patent holders to demonstrate active use of a patent as a pre-condition for any legal enforcement of exclusivity.
 * Apply legal protection to all non-commercial use of patented material (any subsequent commercial use would remain actionable).
 * Apply legal protection to open source products.
 * Apply legal protection for infringing items which are developed independently and without knowledge of existing patents.

Reform software patents
 * Apply a higher patent continuity fee.
 * Fees will fund impartial, professional reviewers and consultants (experienced in the relevant areas) to review software patents, with the goal of blocking patents that are obvious to someone experienced in area, not novel or having prior-art.
 * Set the length of patents for inventions primarily embodied in software to 5 years.
 * Ensure only specific implementations are protected, with functional claiming and outcomes disallowed.
 * Require software patents to contain sufficient information for someone experienced in software development to be able to implement the invention.

Abolish patents on genes and living organisms
 * Retain patents on inventions based on a gene (which neither require nor confer rights to the gene itself).

Abolish patents on pharmaceutical drugs
 * Techniques for creating pharmaceutical drugs will remain patentable.
 * All patents on chemicals will be placed in the public domain, and manufacturers will be encouraged to produce generics.
 * Redirect $5 billion from current spending on Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme:
 * $1 billion to ensure drug prices are low across the board, and no drug is made more expensive under new arrangements.
 * $2 billion each year to directly fund drug research through the CSIRO and tertiary institutions.
 * $2 billion each year to trial a "bounty system" to reward firms who create drugs which serve an identified public benefit.
 * The bounty would be paid annually, over a ten-year period of time.
 * Incentives would be offered to both first- and second-movers: where a new invention is based upon an earlier invention, rewards would be split even if the initial drug is superseded.
 * The amount of the reward for a particular drug would be determined by an expert panel and based on public health outcomes such as number of beneficiaries, level of therapeutic benefit, and capacity to address priority healthcare needs.
 * Drugs subject to a bounty will be placed in the public domain.
 * Begin negotiations on a global medical R&D treaty, open to any nation willing to commit appropriate funds to support R&D.
 * Improve reporting requirements
 * Improve reporting requirements around public funding spent on pharmaceutical development
 * Improve pharmaceutical sector reporting to the ACCC to prevent anticompetitive behaviour

Restructure patent fees
 * Reduce the initial threshold for claim fees, and increase claim fees for applications with a large number of claims.
 * Initiate a review into patent fee structure - including the feasibility of adopting a Declared Value System to replace the existing cost-recovery based patent fee system.

Implement the Productivity Commission's recommendations to improve the patent legal system
 * Introduce a specialist IP list in the Federal Circuit Court, encompassing features similar to those of the United Kingdom Intellectual Property Enterprise Court:
 * Limit trials to two days
 * Caps on costs and damages
 * Small claims procedure
 * Expand the jurisdiction of the Federal Circuit Court to hear all IP matters, and provide the resources necessary to maintain existing resolution times.
 * Assess the costs and benefits of these reforms five years after implementation

A national Science Plan
Science created modern society. Through the scientific method, humanity has harnessed the power of natural forces, revolutionised our social order, and gained incredible knowledge of the universe in which we live. Economic growth is largely the result of improvements in science and technology, and research has long shown that public investment in science pays off many times over.

It's time Australia put real muscle behind it's scientific endeavour and adopted a serious National Science Plan. Australia is the only OECD nation to lack one, and researchers in this country are constrained by under-funding, poor collaboration among research bodies, and erratic grant periods. A Science Plan will address these issues systemically and provide a pathway for a broadening of our research profile into areas such as space research, which offer potentially enormous benefits.

A Science Plan would help to address poor collaboration between business and higher education. Overseas experience suggests voucher programs represent one way to achieve this. Voucher programs allow small businesses purchase services from education and research bodies, which generates a dual benefit of raising overall research funding and encouraging long-term relationship building between sectors. Collaboration can also be supported by allowing researchers at government bodies to personally own patents on their research. In places such as Germany, this has enabled entrepreneurial researchers to spin out and start new businesses, adding vibrancy to the private sector and breaking down barriers between private and public spheres.

A science plan would also provide a pathway to addressing chronic underfunding. As noted in the patents policy, a huge amount of money is currently wasted on paying the cost of drug patents. Freeing up this funding will provide billions each year—properly used, this could revolutionise science teaching and research in Australia.

Pirate Party Australia advocates the following reforms:

Develop an Australian Science Plan
 * Improve co-ordination among science bodies.
 * Establish an Innovation Board comprising researchers, government and industry representatives to draw together existing programs, develop research and innovation priorities and monitor Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) progress.
 * Improve public understanding of science.
 * Provide an online portal for use by schools and the general public, with permanent streaming and free download of publicly owned science and science education programs.
 * Require every primary school to employ at least one teacher with specialised STEM skills.
 * Improve conditions for researchers.
 * Align disparate grant processes and link grant periods to requirements of the research.
 * Recommence the International Science Linkages program.
 * Provide an online portal to facilitate researcher access to alternative funding sources, including crowdfunding.
 * Allow researchers working within government bodies to own patents on their research.
 * Re-purpose existing funding to directly support scientific research.
 * Provide $4 billion in additional annual funding to the Australian Research Council and other research bodies to support academic work in science and social science.
 * Provide $1 billion in additional annual funding to the CSIRO to support fundamental research.
 * Provide $4 billion in additional annual funding to support pharmaceutical research (see patent policy).
 * Engage Australian Academy of Science to develop a long-term plan for funding and operation of Australian research infrastructure facilities.
 * Establish a National Institute for Space Science to co-ordinate infrastructure and projects and seek global capital.
 * Provide $100 million for one-off development of space infrastructure recommended in the NCSS Decadal Plan.