Forget “Is there life in other galaxies?” The question the government’s re-election strategists need to ask today is: “Is there life in Warkworth?”

At 4.15pm today, AUT’s $1 million radio telescope will go live – the first stage in a trans-Tasman bid to win right to build a $NZ4 billion megascience project called the Square Kilometre Array (SKA).

The dish, built by Michigan’s Patriot Systems and assembled at the Warkworth Satellite Station north of Auckland, will serve as a proof-of-concept project, along with 44 dishes in Australia.

In 2011, an independent body called the2011 by an independent scientific community panel called the International SKA Site Advisory Committee (ISSC) will decide whether Australia and New Zealand or a rival South African-led bid will be granted the right to build the SKA – which in the case of the ANZ bid would involve an array of 5000 radio telescopes, creating a single virtual telescope capable of looking back toward the early years of the universe with unrivalled clarity.

But despite the project’s centrality to the future of New Zealand science, Minister of Research, Science and Technology Pete Hodgson has declined an invitation to attend today. Communications and IT Minister David Cunliffe and Prime Minister Helen Clark also passed (the latter cited the Vodafone Music Awards later tonight).

In the government trio’s absence from the prime pre-election photo op, Rodney Mayor Penny Webster and local National MP Dr Lockwood Smith will preside over the ribbon cutting.

While Clark has publically endorsed the ANZ bid – no small thing given the potential state-funding required –– her government’s support has been low key, and only came after prompting from Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, a vocal proponent of the big science project, at their December bilateral meeting.

For more on the geopolitics and science behind the bid, see: