History has never been a roadmap to the future, but it has probably never been a less reliable guide.

There have been momentous and convulsive periods in human history, but has there been a time when almost all the world was affected by simultaneous profound megatrends, all putting stress on the assumptions that have underpinned so much of our thinking and expectations?

The impact of these megatrends is near universal, but there are some sectors deeper in the crucible of change than others.

Those in the public sector are especially exposed and few more so than the higher and vocational education sectors.

Think about four big issues at the heart of so many of the conversations dominating policy discussion.

A population on an inexorable path from younger to older throughout the wealthier, developed world.

The transition from IT to AI.

A shift in our energy sources from carbon to renewable, and a geopolitical world that has flipped from decades of relative stability to insecurity and uncertainty.

Each is huge in its own right.

But we can already see that the sum of these great changes is greater than the parts.

Taken together, these megatrends are pulling away many of the core assumptions our community has taken for granted for many years and on which businesses and organisations have built their operating models.

The aging population is crushing the budgets of public sector organisations, driving down revenues and pushing up costs for governments, not as part of the fiscal cycle we are used to, but as a permanent feature.

The second and third order impacts of the carbon to renewable transition are adding unpredicted – and unpredictable costs. Not just the first order costs of swapping out one form of energy generation for another, and the immediate second order effects, such as who will pay to upgrade power grids and how and where we build a charging network for EVs.

It is the third order effects we are only now beginning to see, such as the impact on our assumptions about how long suburban road infrastructure will last if the average vehicle weight increases by up to 50 percent through the transition to EVs.

How much will that cost … and how will we pay when the aging population is impacting revenues that help pay to build and maintain the roads?

And then there is IT to AI. McKinsey has predicted 60 per cent of jobs will be significantly transformed through AI by 2030. Already, some jobs look like endangered species. What is your career expectancy if you are an interpreter?

What are interpreters planning as they lie awake in bed at night? Probably retraining.

For years, there has been talk that education will become a lifelong journey.

But what if it becomes a reality for a sizeable proportion of the population not in 10 years but in 5? What if the average student is not a person in their 20s but someone in mid-life, with all the associated demands and pressures shaping when and how they can learn?

What does this mean financially for a university with huge sunk investments in assets, suddenly providing less return than expected, simultaneously trying to scale up teaching resources for new areas of demand?

Overlaying all of this is the fourth megatrend – the most profound realignment in global affairs in at least 35 years, as nations move from certainty to insecurity and interconnectedness to self-sufficiency.

How do we as a nation respond to the need for secure, sovereign AI, the opportunity of renewable energy industries, and the need to assure a population, with increased reliance on medical services, we will not again be at the end of the global queue for crucial medicines in a time of scarcity when our traditional friends are “looking after number one”?

There is no doubt our higher education institutions will have a critical role to play in building the self-sufficiency Australia needs to navigate the tumult to come in the next decade.

The precipitous withdrawal of research funds from the US understandably shocked the sector earlier this year but was itself an example of that critical sector’s vulnerability to the megatrend of global uncertainty.

Yes, it was characteristic of the unpredictability of policy making under the current US President.

It would be a mistake, though, to associate this entirely with President Trump.

It is indicative not only of the increasing self-interest of US policy for more than 15 years, but also the trend across all countries of prioritising self-reliance in the name of resilience.

This was brought into sharp relief earlier this year when the US Government announced plans to withdraw funds committed to research projects in Australia because of changed ideology under the then newly minted Trump Administration.

There could hardly be a more direct example of the danger of core national capability – our national research and development effort – being dependent on international sources of funds in a world where historical alliances are no longer a reliable guide to future action.

It also could hardly have come at a more sensitive time. The Federal Government had only recently initiated a Strategic Review of R&D to respond to the woeful and worsening state of national investment in R&D.

The lack of industrial diversity and complexity in the economy was identified as both a cause and a consequence of this downward spiral.

TechnologyOne, which not only owes its existence to the innovation system in Australia over decades but continues to reinvest 20-25 percent revenue in R&D every year because it is the heart of our competitiveness, decided to take an initiative in the national interest.

We chose not to stand by and allow young researchers to be given a message that a career in innovation in Australia offered no security because funds could precipitously be withdrawn even when hard won through competitive application processes.

We committed up to $3 million to a fund to help the research program and wrote to the CEOs of the ASX 200 to ask them to join us.

Only two companies responded positively. Both Australian tech businesses, Vault Cloud and Reason Group, are exposed to international competition.

The three of us are going ahead and accepting applications for a share of the money, which we hope can make a difference.

But until the Australian business, government and education community starts to understand that we stand together or fall together, we will not be masters of our destiny in a world suddenly both uncertain and potentially hostile.