Smart thinking
He’s known as our leading science communicator and Paul Callaghan’s message is that New Zealand should focus on its high-tech sector and innovation to grow the economy.
Tuesday, May 19 2009 || Features || BY Mark Revington
| Photo: Mike Heydon |
He came from Wanganui, went to Oxford, where he obtained his Doctor of Philosophy degree working in low temperature nuclear physics, and ended up at Massey University. In 2001 he was appointed Alan MacDiarmid Professor of Physical Sciences at Victoria University.
He headed the MacDiarmid Institute of Advanced Materials and Nanotechnology until last year. He is a founding director of Magritek, a small Wellington-based company that sells nuclear magnetic resonance instruments.
In March this year, he published Wool to Weta, which follows his lecture tour ‘Beyond the Farm and Theme Park’. The book includes interviews with 18 experts and entrepreneurs, mainly from the high-tech sector, which Callaghan believes will play an increasing role in generating export earning for New Zealand.
What sort of reaction has your new book Wool to Weta had so far?
I haven’t seen any reviews as yet but the media reaction has been interesting and sales are going well. In fact the publishers, Auckland University Press, said it’s going much better than their normal portfolio of books. They said it was number 112 which didn’t sound very good to me, but they told me I’m competing with titles like the Edmonds Cookery Book. I was down at Unity Books in Wellington yesterday and they said it was among their top three sellers for the week and said it was going really well. I’ll believe it when I see the royalties.
There has been a lot of interest amongst some of the policy people in Wellington. It got a very good reception at the Wellington Chamber of Commerce, for example. And, curiously, I bumped into the Prime Minister at a breakfast here in Wellington and happened to exchange a few words. He just happened to be speaking about New Zealand’s good fortune in being involved in selling agricultural products and tourism services to the world and expressing a kind of scepticism of the value of being in the high-tech sector. He actually said this in public which was interesting.
Do you feel at times that you are a voice crying in the wilderness?
Part of me says, ‘Paul, stop talking about this stuff and just get on and do it with your own company,’ and we are having a lot of fun with Magritek and we’ve got bold plans. But the thing is there are some great stories out there about what is happening in New Zealand. We have half a dozen companies in this high-tech space exporting significant amounts, which suggests there is no reason in principle why we couldn’t have a hundred.
The other thing is this whole issue of numbers versus adjectives. All the political and economic talk around the economy is always around adjectives – we should have lower taxes, we should have less bother from the Resource Management Act – but the numbers are telling us there is a US$30 billion deficit. You start looking at that number and think how do you bridge that gap? When the PM talks about agriculture and tourism, it doesn’t seem to make sense to me.
Not forgetting the great cycleway plan?
Oh, let’s not even go there. There’s an issue here around what the numbers are really telling us about our resource-based economy which isn’t capable of generating the increase in productivity or total production to bridge that gap.
