This is creating international embarrassment.
COMPETITION ISN'T everything. Communities also need people to be neighbourly, tolerant and well-mannered —the civilised attitudes and behaviours that bind us.
Based on this need, we created public services and amenities and thought up ideas like democracy and the rule of law, universal education, human rights. We call these benefits the public good.
Centuries of effort by numberless thinking people have created our public good, each contribution adding to previous ones like the stones that make life what it is today.
This belongs to everybody, crossing all social boundaries. It can yield financial returns, but its most valuable benefits aren’t only financial.
There is a myriad of benefits that have been created for mankind, if the Coalition has its way all research will have to have a dollar payout, in other words if you can't prove that your research in the end can make a holy dollar don't start.
The total true benefits from a project may take generations to unfold and yet they continue with this head in the sand approach of worshiping the quick buck?
But when the public good is turned into a commodity to be bought or sold, it ceases to be a public good and our civil society is diminished.
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