Malcolm Turnbull should learn the lessons of the past with his push for innovation.
The Prime Minister is to be applauded for his support for innovation, but he should be warned: it has been tried before and failed.
Remember Bob Hawke's "Clever Country"? It was a good, timely idea that didn't work, even though it was well implemented.
During the Clever Country period, high school graduates were lured into science courses with generous stipends and no HECS. For enrolling in some physics and chemistry courses, a student was paid enough to live in reasonable comfort while completing a postgraduate degree. Did it work? Not particularly well, for a few reasons. 
First, science is hard. Unlike liberal arts, you can actually give wrong answers in science exams and be penalised for it. There is no room for woolly fudging in maths, computer science, physics and chemistry. Who would volunteer for a course where failure is a possibility?
Second, in this country the top matriculants go into medicine. If the score is a little lower, law will do. After that come the soft arts options.
Science courses are the easiest to get into because there is no competition for places. Technology and engineering are even less desirable, perhaps for the prudent reasoning that asks, "What will I do with an engineering degree? Where will I work?"
There are some historic reasons for Australia's dismal performance in innovation and invention. Donald Horne, in the ironically titled The Lucky Country, pointed out the obvious: a nation that is, in his words, a place of branch offices of multinationals, is not going to be doing much research and development. That will all be done elsewhere, in the laboratories at head office, and that is the way we like it.
When computers were becoming ubiquitous in office and home, a few locally owned companies tried to get a piece of the business. They failed, partly because of customer fear of buying the wrong machines and suffering the consequences. Local manufacturers ran up against the aphorism, no one was ever sacked for buying IBM.
The persistent myth that Australians are inventive flies in the face of the evidence. The rotary clothes hoist doesn't cut it in the innovation catalogue, and the much-vaunted flight recorder is not much use in a country that doesn't have an aviation industry. As for winged keels - remember, as Barry Jones was fond of saying: "How many winged keels have you bought this week?"
There is one significant historical explanation for innovation success in countries like the United States, Japan, South Korea and China: they all benefited from having closed, protected manufacturing sectors.
While South Korea was rebuilding after the war between the South and the North, if you wanted to buy a car, computer or television, it had to be Korean.This protected manufacturers from the consequences of failure caused by inferior products. They were given the time and space necessary to improve their products.
This is how a nation that was a pile of rubble in 1952 became a powerhouse of innovation and excellence in manufacturing, while we went from being one of the richest countries to our present status of, in the words of Lee Kuan Yew, the de-developing nation of Asia.
Jeremy Clarkson, in an episode of Top Gear in which he road-tested a Holden Monaro, rebadged as a Vauxhall, asked his co-hosts: "Do any of you have anything in your home that was made in Australia?" The answer was "no".
So, he said, how amazing that this wonderful car comes from a place that doesn't make anything else. What he didn't say was that the car in question was the product of a US company about to quit these shores.
We are in big trouble.
Bob Hawke's well-intentioned Clever Country scheme came to nought, perhaps because it focused too narrowly on the education of the next generation of inventors.
His scheme also tried to foster a more creative relationship between educational institutions, the CSIRO, other government-supported research centres and manufacturing; it didn't come to anything because, without indigenously owned manufacturing, there is no partnership to foster.
Consider this: important research work has been done on solar power generation in our universities, but when it comes to installing photovoltaic cells we have two choices: German or Chinese.
We are said to be taking to domestic solar power faster than any nation, but we can't make our own solar panels? That doesn't look very clever.
Renowned businessman Gordon Barton once explained our national good fortune, enjoyed in spite of our obvious ineptitude in the things that matter, as being "like an idiot who keeps winning the lottery".
Perhaps when our luck runs out and the mines and wells are exhausted, we might come to our senses.
In the meantime we can only hope that Malcolm Turnbull knows something that his predecessors didn't.