Funding uncertainty makes it much harder for Australia to attract and retain research talent. One story about a disappearing job very nearly put me off ever coming to this beautiful country, writes Nobel laureate Brian Schmidt.

The potential carnage of turning off Australia's science research infrastructure has been postponed for at least another year.

Amid a great clamour from the research and business communities, Education Minister Christopher Pyne agreed to not make funding for the National Collaborative Research Infrastructure Strategy (NCRIS) program contingent on savings from his proposed higher education reforms.

It's a win, but it's not the first time we've had to fight to continue advancing knowledge, and it almost certainly won't be the last. Do we really want the nation's brightest scientists wasting their time and energy on repeatedly convincing governments it's worthwhile to continue to invest in projects and work that's reaped significant economic rewards for Australia and made huge improvements to the lives and lifestyles of people the world over?

There is a better way.

To reap the benefits of science, society needs patience. While political change can rise and fall in a day, the circle of research and development runs on a multi-decadal timescale between when a discovery is made and when society directly benefits. It is for this reason that the single most important part of science and research policy is stability.

And yet, in my 20 years in Australia, I and other researchers in businesses, universities, and government agencies have faced a continually changing landscape of short-term programs, strategies, and political emphases. Uncertainty caused by this haphazard approach leads to huge inefficiency by stranding investments, making it impossible to strategically plan, and ultimately making Australia a less than preferred option for researchers from here and around the world. It's why clever Australians like evolutionary biologist Danielle Edwards are leaving their home country to work elsewhere.

Because science is so international, and so connected, stories like Danielle's spread fast and wide. They make it much harder to attract talent from the rest of the world, and retain the talent we have. A similar story very nearly put me off ever coming to this beautiful country: one of my great astronomy professors at Harvard accepted a position in Australia in 1975, but the position disappeared just before he was to arrive, when the Whitlam government fell. Nineteen years later, his experience still coloured my view, and became one of my principal concerns about emigrating to Australia. Fortunately I had an Australian wife who could reassure me - but for many people, the story of that bad experience would have been enough not to come.

Stability is one cornerstone of good policy. Supplying sufficient resources to areas to ensure they are internationally competitive is another. By resources I mean funds to enable researchers to work, state-of-the-art equipment, and time.

Australia isn't big enough to do everything, so we have to be strategic about what we fund. Good policy means funding fewer things, but funding them thoughtfully and doing them really well. This is a point that has been made loudly and repeatedly by Australia's Chief Scientist, who has just announced his draft research priorities for Australia.

To achieve both stability and critical mass, most researchers benefit from being in strong institutions. In Australia, research is concentrated in the universities, CSIRO, and other government agencies. Keeping these organisations strong is crucial.

CSIRO has long been Australia's secret weapon within the research sector. It has had the structure and expertise to do R&D involving many disciplines and at a scale that simply cannot be achieved by a university.

But somewhere over time, CSIRO's mission has become blurry. Its funding and prestige has decreased, its relationship with industry has been compromised by it being judged on how many royalties it collects rather than how much it has empowered Australian industry, and it finds itself in competition with universities as often as it collaborates with those same institutions.

Despite all this, CSIRO remains a great national treasure, and it is vital that the Government, the research community, and CSIRO itself agree on its mission. With national strategic goals and revitalised relationships with universities and industry, CSIRO can and should be built up to ensure it remains a powerhouse of advanced research and development.

While much science starts out being done for the sake of increasing our knowledge, rather than for a specific economic outcome, it is the translation of this knowledge to economic benefit that justifies the more than $9 billion the Australian Government spent last year in R&D. A recent analysis by University of New South Wales economists found there are significant productivity spillovers from government investment in the research agencies and higher education research, but no measurable benefit from expenditure in things like R&D tax concessions for business. It seems the government is getting decent bang for its buck when it spends money in universities and CSIRO, but current business R&D programs are not particularly effective.

This finding does not mean we should abandon government programs to support R&D within business. In fact, it means our current programs are poorly directed. Australia is among the OECD's worst performers when it comes to extracting direct business benefit from our university research. A grown-up R&D policy needs to bring together the cultures of businesses, universities and research agencies. Solving this problem is the Holy Grail for Australia's R&D sector, and given its potential effect on the long-term productivity growth of our nation, it is a place where the Government should focus policy development resources.

I'm no policy wonk, but I can see some simple and powerfully effective ways to ensure our scientists spend more time on knowledge generation and less time on fighting for the resources they need to get their work done. Improving science policy in Australia is not rocket science, but getting it right will empower rocket scientists (and everyone else within the sector) to shape a productive and prosperous future for Australia.

Professor Brian Schmidt AC FAA is Australian Research Council Laureate Fellow and astrophysicist at the Australian National University's Mount Stromlo Observatory. In 2011, he won a Nobel Prize for his work showing that the expansion of the universe is accelerating. He is a member of the Commonwealth Science Council and the Council of the Australian Academy of Science.