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Reporting on the Corporation
 

How our Staff are Employed Staff Numbers and Remuneration Staff Training Commonwealth Disability Strategy Organisational structure Our people Freedom of information

Accountability to Industry Corporate Publications Public Relations The Web Project Listings Royalties Scholarships

 
 

RIRDC employment at a glance Key Objective To attract and retain an innovative, productive, creative and committed group of staff. Key Results Corporate systems that continue to meet accreditation standards with ISO 9001:2000 `Quality Assurance from SGS Systems & Services Certi?cation Pty. Ltd. No claims lodged with Comcare in 2003–04. Absenteeism of 25 hours per employee in 2003–04, down from 28 hours per employee in 2002–03. $1,182 per person training investment. The Year Ahead Continued priority on sta? undertaking work related continuing education programs to ensure their preferences continue to grow and they stay with the Corporation. Have a workplace which results in zero Comcare claims. Ensure the Corporation is in the lowest 25 per cent quartile on absenteeism when compared to industry benchmarks.

How our staff are employed
RIRDC staff are employed under Section 87 of the PIERD Act 1989. This legisla-tion requires the Corporation to determine appropriate terms and conditions of employment for its staff.

During 2003–04 all staff other than those on individual contracts were covered by the RIRDC General Terms and Conditions of Employment. These terms were reviewed in September 2002 and a new two year agreement endorsed by the Board and the sta?. It took e?ect from 1 October 2002. Under these arrangements the Corporation reserves the right to employ new sta? on either individual con-tracts or on the general terms and conditions.

Staff numbers and remunerations
At the end of June 2004 the Corporation had 18 sta? members engaged on a full-time basis. Ten of these were on individual contracts. RIRDC also had a number of part-time sta?. Details on the salaries of full-time sta? are summarised in the table below. Consistent with its legislative obligations, the Corporation is an equal opportunity employer.

In addition to the resources above, the Corporation had eight external managers contracted to manage various R&D sub-programs. The organisational structure at the end June 2004 is shown on page 75.

Freedom of Information
The Corporation publishes or holds the following categories of documents: those provided free to the public, while stocks are available, or displayed on the Corporation’s website; those sold to the public on a partial cost-recovery basis; general administrative documents - including project and personnel ?les, and planning/reporting documents.

As required under the FOI Act 1982 the Corporation submits an Annual Section 9 Statement to the National Archives of Australia outlining the documents and processes used to make decisions in relation to the funding of R&D Projects.

An up-to-date listing of projects funded by the Corporation in 2003–04 is set out in Research-in-Progress documents and on the Corporation’s website. Funding information on individual projects is available, on request, from the Corporation.

The Corporation received no requests under the Freedom of Information Act in 2003–04. General inquiries about access to documents or other matters relating to FOI should be directed to:

Ms Susan McNeilly Acting General Manager, Business & Finance
Rural Industries Research and Development Corporation
PO Box 4776 KINGSTON ACT 2604
Phone: 02 6272 4656
Fax: 02 6272 5877
Email: susan.mcneilly@rirdc.gov.au

Staff training
The Corporation’s training investment in 2003–04 was $22,455. This compares with $23,979 in 2002–03. On a per capita basis for full-time equivalent staff, this represents an investment of nearly $1,182 in 2003–04. This investment focused primarily on on-going tertiary education, professional development and computer application courses.

Commonwealth’s Disability Strategy
The Federal Government has decided that progress in implementing the Commonwealth’s Disability Strategy should be reported by all Commonwealth agencies. The Government is using this Strategy to ensure its policies, programs and services are as accessible to people with disabilities as they are to all Australians. The Corporation is committed to preparing indicators under the Strategy for future reporting and to identifying areas for improvement by systems changes or organisation-wide solutions.

Human resources benchmarking(a) RIRDC in context

(a) Mercer Human Resources Consulting: Human Resources E?ectiveness Monitor (September 2004).
(b) “By size”: The RIRDC benchmark group is < 200
(c) “By industry”: The RIRDC benchmark group is GBE (Government Business Enterprise)

Organisational Structure
as at 30 June 2004

Our People
Our Staff Values:

• to nurture a climate of mutual trust and respect
• to understand, accept and value individual differences and capabilities
• to recognise and respect the role of a cohesive and co-operative team, built on shared goals, successes and setbacks
• to communicate, question and consult openly and honestly throughout the whole organisation
• to clearly define roles, delegations, responsibilities and accountabilities
• to support and commit to personal and professional development.

 

Corporate Publications
The Corporation continues to have a very active publications program. The Corporation now has more than 1000 publications in its series. Sales in 2003–04 amounted to $126,355. This compares with $108,455 in the previous year. Actual sales numbers in 2003–04 were 7,552 compared with 8,756 in 2002–03. There has been a very signi?cant increase in downloading of reports from our website. Details on new publications issued in 2003–04 for each sub-program are set out under each respective sub-program.

The Corporation’s pricing policy is based on recouping only the costs of printing and distribution for sub–program speci?c publications. Corporate publications are free and, for 2003–04, included:

Corporate documents

• 2002–03 Annual Report (Awarded gold medal at the Australasian Reporting Awards for the fourth consecutive year)
• Annual Operational Plan
• Research Priorities
• RIRDC Research in Progress (issued as individual sub-program chapters)
• Publications Catalogue
• In partnership with program managers developed an intellectual property brochure distributed to researchers outlining RIRDC’s expectations from its re-search collaborators

Newsletters
Corporate Newsletter

• sub-programs:
• Essential Oils
• Asian Foods
• Honeybee – R&D Updates
• Fodder Crops
• Pasture Seeds
• Rice R&D Update for Year of Rice

Five-Year Plans

• All industry sub-programs have plans that are available free to stakeholders.

Public relations
The Corporation’s Public Relations program focuses on the promotion of research results to encourage the practical adoption of this knowledge.
During the past year, there have been ongo-ing campaigns to encourage adoption. This has involved media and advertising campaigns, and also the use of secondary networks such as direct mail and existing networks in the public and pri-vate sectors.

The successful use of two monthly email news-letters, which have more than 2700 subscribers, shows there are opportunities for low-cost com-munications through non-traditional channels. Increasing utilisation of this information by jour-nalists and others reveals the use of electronic dis-tribution will become increasingly e?ective over time.

One email newsletter contains short articles on RIRDC reports and other news, while the second is a full list of all news reports posted the website each month.

The Corporation also continued to market its prod-ucts both directly and indirectly through:

• direct mail campaigns to libraries and known RIRDC publication clients
• various Corporation newsletters
• networks among other Australian and State Government agencies/departments
• private sector information brokers
• farm advisors/consultants
• internal networks (advisory committees/panels).

The Web: www.rirdc.gov.au
The website continued to deliver a growing range of research reports and corporate information to stakeholders and target audiences important to the Corporation.

A major innovation during the year was the inclu-sion of the Google search facility for visitors to the site. This greatly increased the accuracy of searches, but also offered the ability to view PDF ?les online in HTML format, thereby overcom-ing the need for a full download of the report for review purposes. The new search facilities on the homepage resulted in a dramatic jump in ‘hits’ from an average of about 170,00 a month to more than 690,00 in March 2002 and to 950,000 in May 2004, as the graph below shows.

Most visitors entered the site through the ‘home’ page. A majority found the site through major search engines such as Google, Yahoo and NineMSN (in that order).

The program pages in which each sub-program has a virtual ‘home page’ continue to be popular. The emailed newsletter and the list of new research reports continued to be well received by nearly 2800 recipients each month with much positive feedback.

The fourth Government Online Survey was com-pleted for the National O?ce of the Information Economy (NOIE) showing that RIRDC complied very substantially with the Government’s online requirements for editorial production, design, security, access, online procurement and privacy issues.

A complete overhaul of the online bookshop was undertaken in January. This was necessitated by a steady increase in errors and lack of support. In addition, the new online shop has the ability to host images and offers users a “cleaner” inter-face. Development of the new site was performed in-house using commercial software. Prior to the upgrade the bookshop averaged about 15 transactions a month valued at between $500 and $800, however this had increased to more than $2000 per month in June and there are expectations this will increase further during 2004–05.

RIRDC Rural Women’s Award 2004 www.ruralwomensaward.gov.au
This site was established in November 1999 when the Corporation first launched the RIRDC Rural Women’s Award 2000 and has been maintained in line with the running of the Award each year. Access to the site can also be gained through RIRDC’s home page. Tra?c to site peaks during the nomination period for the awards in August-October each year, but there is considerable inter-est throughout the year in the site.

RIRDC Extranet
The Corporation has also established an Extranet which enables its directors and external research managers access to corporate information, pre-viously only available as a local area networked Intranet.
This site works both locally and online and is con-stantly updated and monitored. It is password protected so that only authorised users can gain access.
Two major additions to the extranet have been a news clipping service and the quality assurance pages and documents.

Project Listings
This Annual Report does not contain a listing of projects under contract. There were 611 at the end of June 2004. The comparable figure for last year was 616.

As an aid to getting the details on each of these individual projects, the Corporation has finalised its Research-in-Progress report, which shows ‘current status’ of projects at the end of May 2004.

In addition, all projects completed in 2003–04 have summaries showing their key outcomes. As already noted, this report Research-in-Progress, June 2004 has been published on our website (www.rirdc.gov.au) under each respective program area.

Royalties
During 2003–04 the Corporation received $56,253 (exclusive of GST) in royalty income from the following activities.

• Royalties of $30,097 were generated from sales in relation to vaccines developed for Mycoplasma gallisepticum and Mycoplasma synoviae, research commercialisation outputs of RIRDC’s Chicken Meat sub-program in asso-ciation with the University of Melbourne and a private sector commercial partner.
• Royalties of $21,730 were received from the development and licensing of varieties of cer-tain species of fodder legumes for sowing seed and seed export. Research and commercialisation was undertaken by RIRDC in asso-ciation with Seed Technology and Marketing Pty Limited.
• Royalties of $2,350 were generated from sales of the ILT 20A vaccine that was developed by CSIRO with funding from the RIRDC’s Chicken Meat sub-program to control infectious laryn-gotracheitis, a viral respiratory tract disease in poultry.
• Royalties of $1,492 were generated from one line of forage crops developed as part of RIRDC’s Pasture Seeds and Fodder Crops sub-programs. This research and commer-cialisation was undertaken in association with the University of Western Australia and the Department of Agriculture WA.
• A licence fee of $500 was received from the licensing of the PESKEM software developed jointly with the University of Queensland. The software provides information on registered Australian agrochemicals in a user friendly, easy to use database package.
• Royalties of $84 were received from the de-velopment and licensing of salt tolerant clones/germplasm which exhibit high pulp quality. This research and commercialisation was undertaken by RIRDC in association with Murdoch University and other private sector commercial partners.

Scholarships
A key aim of the Corporation’s R&D endeavours is to ensure that portfolio-related industries are supported by people with high-quality scientific, technical and leadership skills. In 2003–04, the Corporation’s programs also continued to support conferences and field days aimed at providing the platform for transferring information and com-mercialising R&D outcomes.

The formal postgraduate education program of the Corporation seeks to ensure that industries have a continuous supply of well-trained people. In 2003–04, the Corporation committed $330,575 (GST exclusive) on this area, $311,825 for con-tinuing scholarships and $18,750 for new scholar-ships.

Scholarships awarded in 2003–04
In 2003–04, the Corporation funded two new scholarships as detailed below.

Ongoing scholarships
The Corporation sponsored 18 ongoing postgraduate scholarships in 2003–04

Accountability to industry
For the purposes of reporting on operations in 2003–04, RIRDC had two organisations prescribed by Section 7 of its legislation. This requires RIRDC to report annually on its activities each ?nancial period. This accountability runs parallel to RIRDC’s Annual Report to the Minister and the Parliament. Separately, it is relevant to note that the Deer, Honeybee and Rice Industries are nominated as representative bodies for the Primary Industry (Excise) Levies Act 1999.

Formal reporting during 2003–04 occurred as follows:

• National Farmers’ Federation (NFF) 26 November 2003.
• Australian Chicken Meat Association (ACMA) 26 March 2004.

RIRDC’s reporting to these prescribed bodies was done when industry meetings were being held for their own purposes. The Corporation made no payments towards the costs of these meetings.

The reporting of these consultation ments is in accord with guidelines then Minister on 6 July 1998 Consultation Costs by Primary Industry Portfolio Statutory Authorities’. In relation to the guidelines, it should one of our representative organisations operative research contract with in 2003–04, listed as follows:

Org	Pt No.	Project Title
NFF	NFF-3A	Increase Women’s Participation in National Farmers’ Federation (NFF) Decision Making

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