Hon House Chair, Minister, Deputy Minister and members, in an array of mediocre departments paying lip service to the implementation of, sometimes, very good policy, the Department of Science and Technology does stand out like one of the shining stars that can be viewed from Sutherland. [Applause.]
In a very interesting visit to the 1820 observatory here in Cape Town, we got a clear idea not only of what is happening at the observatory, but also what impacts the telescopes and, specifically, the South African Large Telescope, Salt, had on the small community of Sutherland - the tourist boom, the schools built, a science centre for all to use, guesthouses established and local residents trained to act as tour guides.
The DA welcomes the development of the Square Kilometre Array in the Karoo. The world's attention is fixed on the SKA and the construction of the precursor or pathfinder to the SKA project, which is currently under way - the 64 MeerKAT antennas, the first of which will be installed by December this year.
The majority of the SKA will be built in Africa and as the world's biggest telescope and one of the biggest scientific projects ever, similar benefits to the immediate community and the benefits for the country as a whole should be explored. A concern identified by the Auditor-General in the last audit report for the department was that of the 81 targets planned, only 54 targets were achieved during the year under review.
This represents 33% of total planned targets that were not achieved during the year under review. This was due to the fact that indicators and targets were not suitably developed during the strategic planning process and could indicate poor performance on predetermined objectives. In research, and specifically where our researchers are competing for limited funding, it is crucial that proper and detailed planning be done, that specific objectives are set, that these objectives be measureable, attainable, relevant and time-bound. Failing to achieve the set objectives in one out of three cases is simply not good enough.
Coming to the National Research Foundation, NRF, and specifically Antarctic research, in an earlier parliamentary question by the hon Marian Shinn, it was asked how the SA Agulhas II research facilities could fairly be shared by the Department of Water and Environmental Affairs and the Department of Science and Technology. The answer was that the details would still have to be sorted out.
Climate change and diminishing natural resources are becoming more and more relevant. Only yesterday the media widely reported on the record levels of carbon dioxide recorded on 9 May at the Mauna Loa Observatory on the big island of Hawaii - thank you, James Lorimer. The measurement surpassed 400 parts per million for the first time since records began back in 1958. The question remains: How will the research facilities on the SA Agulhas II - eight permanent and six containerised laboratories for different fields of marine, environmental, biological and climate research - be utilised?
An amount of R400 million was budgeted over the medium term for human capital development and R605 million for the modernisation of research infrastructure through the Human Capital and Knowledge Systems programme, and this should be welcomed. However, in scientific publications published, concerns about funding from the National Research Foundation were raised. There have been allegations such as: "The shift in the funding priorities of the department and the NRF over the past five years is leaving researchers in specific disciplines, as well as their graduate students, high and dry."
Although the shift introducing new and exciting scientific research initiatives is welcomed and is indeed of critical importance, it is also crucially important that new initiatives should not be at the expense of support for the basic sciences across all disciplines, which should be the foundation of the national research effort. It must also support the department's strategic objective to increase the number of rated researchers, strengthening research activities at universities to produce world-class research, and increasing the number of PhD students in South Africa.
An international publication reported that South Africa at present has 393 researchers for each million of our population. This is a very challenging, low figure - about a third of that of Botswana - and is placing South Africa in the bottom group of world research. It is therefore a question of doing the one thing and not neglecting the other. Interaction with tertiary institutions, the bastion of South African research, on their funding problems, listening and responding to the voices at the helm of our research facilities, should therefore be an annual occurrence. [Applause.]