Funding Quantum Hardware, Forsaking Research Talent: The Deepening Crisis in Australian Science

It has been just over two years since the Australian and Queensland governments announced their near-billion-dollar joint venture to fund PsiQuantum. Back in April 2024, policymakers excitedly pitched the construction of a utility-scale quantum computer at Brisbane Airport as an ‘anchor’ for the next industrial revolution. I did not write about it then.  Like many, I assumed the inevitable collision with technical and logistical reality would happen quietly, behind closed doors, perhaps eventually leading to a scaled-back scope or an extended timeline.

But here we are in mid-2026, and the wheels are visibly wobbling.  Last month, the much-touted Brisbane Airport site was unceremoniously abandoned in favour of a council-owned site at Moreton Bay Central.  Yet, despite pivoting to an empty lot at a former paper mill, it appears that neither the company nor the government has publicly walked back their foundational commitment to have the site operational by the end of 2027.  Promising to build the world's first million-qubit, fault-tolerant computer from the ground up in just 18 months is, to put it mildly, an ambitious logistical – and technical –  undertaking!

More importantly, I am writing about this now because we should not continue to ignore the sheer opportunity cost of this mega-project.  While the government plays venture capitalist with a single, highly speculative hardware gamble, the reality is that Australian science may be reaching a breaking point.

According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS), Australia’s Gross Expenditure on R&D (GERD) was a mere 1.69% of GDP in 2023-24.  This leaves us languishing far behind the OECD average, estimated at 2.93% in 2023, and significantly outpaced by peer economies that treat foundational research as critical infrastructure rather than a discretionary expense.

We are, quite literally, starving the ecosystem.

There is a profound irony at the heart of the PsiQuantum deal.  The company is headquartered in Silicon Valley, but its co-founders are products of the Australian university system.  They are the quintessential example of the ‘brain drain’ – talented innovators who left Australia when the domestic funding ecosystem failed to support their ambition.  This leaves us spending nearly a billion dollars of taxpayer money to effectively buy back our own exported talent at a massive premium.

Yet, in doing so, we are contributing to the collapse of the very STEM pipeline required to produce the next generation of innovators.  How does a government justify a near-billion-dollar bet on a speculative hardware project while simultaneously starving the foundation?  The answer, as is so often the case in technology policy, lies in a deliberate semantic conflation.  By using the word ‘quantum’ as a monolithic buzzword, policymakers have successfully blurred the lines between practical, deployable technologies and a long-term engineering marathon.

Let's dive in and look at the data.

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Tags: Australia, Funding, Government programs, Innovation policy, Manufacturing, Politics, Public policy, Quantum technology

What Can Patent Data Tell Us About the Australian Government’s Plan for Local Manufacturing?

This is a guest contribution from Mike Lloyd of Patent-Insights.  Mike previously contributed an article on the impact, from an Australian perspective, of COVID-19 on international patent, trade mark, and registered designs filings.  Further details about the author can be found at the end of the article.

The Australian Federal Government on 1 October 2020 announced a renewed focus and A$1.5 billion investment in manufacturing, in particular in the following six target areas of technology:

1. resources technology and critical minerals;
2. food and beverages;
3. medical products;
4. recycling and clean energy;
5. defence; and
6. space.

The arguments put forward by the Government include wanting to ‘focus on areas of strength’ and wanting to avoid the lesson of ‘don't try to do everything’.

There are merits in these arguments, and there are also arguments for letting market forces rather than governments select our area of strengths.

But because this is a patent blog, I want to ask whether patent data can help to find Australia’s areas of technology strength.

There are many ways we could ask this question, and the most obvious of these might be to look at overall patent filings.  However, this is an imperfect method, as this data risks being corrupted by low quality patents, and there are many low quality patents out there.

Another approach is to look for highly-cited patents. The citing of a patent by another is generally a recognition that the cited patent has made a contribution to the patent literature, and therefore technology in general.  The number of citations for a granted patent can range from zero to over a thousand, but as a simple rule, we could say that any granted patent with 50 or more forward citations is ‘highly-cited’.  To put this into context, the commercial patent search database Patseer lists 8.4 million active and granted patent families (a family with one or more currently granted patents), but only 163,000 (1.9%) of these have 50 or more forward citations.  In contrast, 5.1 million (61%) of granted patents have no forward citations at all.

These ‘highly-cited’ patents could be regarded as the most important patents, and the filers of these patents as leading applicants, i.e. strong in their area of technology.  We could also argue that the more of these highly cited patents that companies have, the more they can be regarded as technology leaders in their space.

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Tags: Guest article, Manufacturing, Patent analytics, Public policy