Higgs boson party to pay off for Melbourne

THE challenge in running cost-benefit analysis on publicly funded major events surfaced again this week with the announcement in Melbourne that the basic building block of matter, the Higgs boson particle, had been found after almost 50 years of searching.

Australia boxes above its natural weight in the world of physics, but it was only a small part of a massive multinational effort to find the Higgs boson using the $US10 billion Large Hadron Collider, a 27-kilometre-long particle accelerator that lies beneath the French-Swiss border near Geneva.
There are about 10,000 particle physicists in the world, and about 30 Australians worked on one of two experiments aimed at finding the particle that were run by CERN, the European Organisation for Nuclear Research.

            The lead local was Professor Geoff Taylor, a University of Melbourne physicist who runs the Australian Research Council Centre for Excellence for Particle Physics at the Tera-scale (a Tera is a million million units, and in this case it signifies that the scientists are looking at very small particles indeed).

He and a small government-private sector-funded vehicle, the Melbourne Convention and Visitors Bureau (MCVB), joined forces to mount an Olympics-style campaign that resulted in Melbourne and Australia being linked to one of most important scientific announcements in history.
The MCVB is tiny. It generated revenue of $11.5 million in the 2010-2011 financial year, including $7.3 million of annual state government funding that survived this year's Victorian budget cuts and is secure until 2014. The City of Melbourne contributes another $1 million year in a funding deal that will be renegotiated next year, and the rest comes mainly from subscription fees from over 250 companies that resource conference projects, and profit from them.
The business convention market is the highest yielding segment of the tourism industry: MCVB's latest estimate is that convention delegates spend $757 a day.
MCVB is too small, however, to take on commercial risk on the conventions it helps attract to the city, 210 of them in 2011-2012. Instead, it identifies convention opportunities, scopes them, and joint-ventures projects with convention hosts. The hosts take the commercial risk, and MCVB and its member organisations provide expertise in bidding for events, and designing and running them.
MCVB approached Geoff Taylor in 2005 and successfully proposed a bid to host the 34th International Conference on High Energy Physics that would see the University of Melbourne take on the commercial risk.
The conference is held every two years by the International Union of Pure and Applied Physics and is an event that has to be won, in a competitive tender that lays out the scientific and commercial cases for the proposed host city.
Taylor's group and the MCVB pitched for the 2006 conference as a learning exercise. It was awarded to Moscow. They launched a serious bid for the 2008 conference but lost to Philadelphia, and lost the 2010 conference narrowly to Paris.
High-end research is an industry like any other. Funding is a function of progress, and the pressure on CERN was intense by 2010 given that the Large Hadron Collider had been operating for two years. Speculation that the Higgs boson would be unveiled in Paris was rife - but no announcement was made, and after going so close in the 2010 contest, Melbourne was in the box seat. It was confirmed as the 2012 host last year.
There is obviously some luck in the timing of Melbourne's capture of this conference, which began this week with co-ordinated announcements in Melbourne and Geneva that the Higgs boson had been identified.
The conference is also not going to shift Australia's economic dial. Financially it may only break even, because the strong Australian dollar and the European recession held numbers to about 800, that is 200 less than initially expected. MCVB is organising other conferences that are 10 times larger.
But there's an intangible dividend from this latest iteration of a public-private project. It's history now that Melbourne was where the Higgs boson discovery was revealed, and reported in thousands of stories around the world. That's publicity you can't buy, and there could be longer term dividends in research, say, post-graduate enrolments or perhaps eventually in commercially applied science. There should be more intelligently designed and skilfully executed projects like these.
GINA Rinehart's sale of 86.5 million shares in Fairfax yesterday cuts her stake from almost 19 per cent to just under 15 per cent, but it is only a tactical retreat. She still wants board seats, and the buyer, Perpetual, appears to think that fresh faces are needed.
Her company, Hancock Prospecting, said last night that it did not intend to ''make an offer'' for Fairfax. But it also renewed its request for the appointment of two of its nominees and a new independent director to the media group's board, and called again for chairman Roger Corbett's tenure to be tied to performance milestones.
The board's requirement that she sign off on the group's independence charter and its belief that the board presence she seeks would give her too much influence are the big stumbling blocks: there has been no sign that Fairfax or Mrs Rinehart are prepared to give ground.
By moving below 15 per cent she may have more tactical options, however. If she were above 15 per cent and on the board, an exclusion clause in Fairfax's directors and officers insurance policy would be triggered, leaving other directors exposed to personal liability in the event of legal action by her. Rather than indemnify them, she has chosen to move down below 15 per cent, to a point where the exclusion clause is neutralised.
If she runs a successful campaign with shareholders for her appointment, in an extraordinary meeting or at Fairfax's next annual meeting, there is less risk now that her appointment would result in a wave of board departures. Rinehart still wants a say inside Fairfax, and she is still manoeuvering to get it: the Game of Thrones continues.