At the end of September, the Australian Academy of Sci-ence hosted their inaugural meeting of the Early/Mid Career Researcher Forum. The Forum was set up in recognition of ‘the challenges faced by Australia’s emerging researchers’ in 2011, in order to ‘help inform its policy recommendations to government’. Having attended the meeting of the New Zealand Association of Scientists earlier this year, which addressed the question ‘Do emerging scientists have a future in New Zealand?’ I was very interested to see how these issues differed across the Tasman. The audience was similar, in that it included PhD students, also established researchers with their own research groups, and a few eminent scientists with some pithy things to say; these included the Australian Chief Scientist Professor Ian Chubb, and the recent Nobel Prize Laureate, Professor Brian Schmidt (@cosmicpinot).