Chief Executive’s review
Kia ora koutou katoa
Highlights of the year
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Completion of our new building at the Tamaki Campus of the University of Auckland. The project took longer than anticipated and cost considerably more than initial budget estimates, in part because of rapidly escalating market-rate building costs. The building has achieved all our sustainability objectives, yet it was completed at a cost very close to that of a conventional building of similar size and functions.
The Prime Minister, Rt Hon Helen Clark, opened our new sustainable building
- Two new joint-ventures with universities were established — the New Zealand Centre for Ecological Economics with Massey University, and the Centre for Urban Ecosystem Studies with the University of Auckland.
- Success in the FRST ‘Sustainability’ funding round with substantial increases in urban and business sustainability research, ecological economics, integrated catchment management, and tourism — all building on strategic changes and investments we have made since 1998, and changes made in the 2000 FRST round when we were able to redirect funding to strategic priorities.
- A tremendously successful International Wildlife Management Congress with nearly 1000 participants, which, for the first time, addressed wildlife management by indigenous people with significant contingents of indigenous people from Australia, Canada and USA attending.
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The promulgation by Government of its Permanent Forest Sinks Policy and regulations, which enable landowners to retain carbon credits for these sinks. This policy was based very strongly on work funded by our investments in recent years such as EBEX21® , and our staff worked closely with officials to develop the policy.
Science Minister, Hon Pete Hodgson
(right), with Professor Murray Patterson, Landcare Research Chair of Ecological Economics, launching the NZCEE, our joint venture with Massey University.
- The completion of our first Sustainability Policy; Manaaki Whenua is continuing to push the boundaries towards a more sustainable future for New Zealand through our actions and our influence.
- A satisfactory financial performance, despite the fact that we were carrying underfunded science staff costs of at least $500,000 in soil science, remote sensing, and wildlfe ecology as a consequence of significant funding losses in these areas from the FRST Sustainability and other funding decisions. The company decided to retain the majority of underfunded staff and to rebuild funding from other sources. Unfortunately, it was not possible to retain all staff and five were made redundant.
Our people strategies
In the Our People section of this report, we review the success of our long-term people strategies over the last decade. One important success story is the steady growth in our proportion of women post-graduate scientists, and our strong retention of women scientsts since about 1995. If these trends continue, within a few years our proportion of post-graduate women scientsts will equal the proportion produced by New Zealand universities. Another success story is the high proportion of staff (63%) who receive employer contributions to retirement savings or student loan repayment. It is a great pleasure to be able to report these achievements.
We are able to recruit quality science staff from all over the world (50% from other countries in recent years, 80% with PhDs), and we retain science staff on average for well over a decade — long enough for them to make a real contribution to our work.
The quantity and quality of the work of our scientists are truly world class.
 David Wardle had three papers in the prestigious Science in 2003/04. |
A recent review by MoRST, which was reported in New Scientist (17 July 2004), showed that New Zealand scientists produce the highest number of refereed publications per million $USD of research funding, at 6.2 papers per million $USD in 2001. For the same period, and based on our total revenue, we produced 7.3 papers per million $USD. Based on our actual PGS&T research revenue, we produced 11.9 papers per million $USD. This is almost double the New Zealand average, seven times the productivity of US scientists, and ten times the productivity of Japanese scientists.
Our papers are published in high-impact journals, and have very high citation
rates. Our ten most-cited papers (73–279 citations) published since
1992 are in journals with impact factors of 0.7–24.6; our ten most-cited
papers (52–74 citations) published since1998 are in journals with
impact factors of 1.6–23.3. Comparisons with a recent Royal Society
of New Zealand study of papers published between 1997 and 1999, show our
papers are also cited considerably more times than New Zealand and world
averages, and slightly exceed the citation rates of all Marsden-funded science
papers.
Graphs showing citation rates »
Full list
of publications by staff »
| Publication citation rates | Never cited | Cited more than 10 times |
| Globally 1 | >40% | 20% |
| Papers published by New Zealand scientists 1 | 32% | 19% |
| Papers published from Marsden Fund research 1 | 16% | 21% |
| Papers published by Manaaki Whenua scientists | 18% | 22% |
1 Data sourced from a bibliometric assessement of Marsden-funded publications, 1997–2001. Royal Scociety of New Zealand, June 2004. www.rsnz.org/funding/evaluation/impact.php
I wonder what other sector of the New Zealand economy is five times as productive as Japan?
Yet, astonishingly, despite this high productivity and the fact that average science salaries in Manaaki Whenua have increased by 47% over the last 11 years (more than double the CPI increase over the same period), median science base salaries and total remuneration in Manaaki Whenua still are 3–8% lower than the median levels for all jobs in New Zealand at the same job points (the general market). This shortfall in pay exists over the range from science technicians to senior scientists. The science sector as a whole is far worse off, being 12–20% below the general market in New Zealand.
This is an appalling situation that is truly unsustainable in the long run. Unless pay for scientists is addressed, New Zealand will not be able to attract young people into science careers. Long-serving science staff, who have been underpaid for the last 15 years, will begin to retire in large numbers by the end of the current decade. By then, there will be very strong global competition for science skills. The limited number of New Zealand science and technology graduates available then won’t stay in New Zealand to work in a sector where they face a lifetime of being paid 15% less than in any other job of similar size! Why should they? If the current workforce continues to be paid below-market salaries by our science funding system, despite their outstanding productivity, our future science workforce will vote with their feet.
In recent years, there have been welcome increases in science funding, after a decade which began with savage cuts in funding, then a long period of no real increase in funds. But the recent increases have all been to purchase more output. None of those increases have been targeted to address a real increase in pay rates. Companies like Manaaki Whenua have worked really hard to increase pay rates out of the current levels of funding, and out of increased revenue from all sources. But, given the productivity levels already being achieved by staff, there is no possibility of squeezing more production out of existing staff. So increased output, and increased revenue, can only be achieved by employing more people — of course being paid the same poor salaries. The science system is long overdue for a ‘baseline’ adjustment in science funding to enable decent, full market salaries to be paid. If it’s good enough for the defence forces and teachers, as recently announced, then it’s good enough for our science workforce.
Management and Board changes
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In mid-year, Oliver Sutherland, one of our original senior managers appointed in 1992, retired after an outstanding career in which he made a major contribution to Manaaki Whenua. Oliver provided exceptional leadership in developing our close working relationships with Māori and in achieving a high level of awareness and adoption of tikanga Māori and te reo Māori in Manaaki Whenua. I was fortunate in being able to rely on his outstanding leadership and judgement, and benefited from his personal mentoring in this regard, from the time of the establishment unit in 1991. I think that his contribution to ensuring that New Zealand science contributes to Māori development and reflects the needs and views of Māori is unmatched, and goes far beyond Manaaki Whenua. Rob Fenwick became Chairman of the Board in January, as part of the company’s succession planning, when Ian Donald retired as Chairman. I thank Ian Donald for his wise guidance and leadership, and the excellent working relationship that I have enjoyed with him since 1998.
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Several new managers were promoted to our Senior Manager Team at the beginning of the year, as part of our succession and development programme. Under the skillful leadership of Ian Whitehouse as Chief Operating Officer — Research, these new managers and their more experienced colleagues have performed exceptionally well in a difficult year.
My thanks to the Board, my excellent team of Senior Managers, and to the outstanding staff of Manaaki Whenua for another year of great performance and achievements.
Andy Pearce
Chief Executive
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