Jennifer Marohasy

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Federal Budget Cuts Mean CSIRO Shake – Up

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Up to 100 jobs will be axed at the nation’s science research agency as a result of Federal Budget cuts.

Dozens of jobs will be lost and CSIRO laboratories will close in Mildura in Victoria and Rockhampton in Queensland.

Mike Whelan from the CSIRO says Government funding has been cut by more than $60 million over four years.

ABC News: Jobs to be axed, labs will close in CSIRO shake-up

CSIRO Media Release: CSIRO continues to set science directions for future

Reader Interactions

Comments

  1. Helen Mahar says

    With an estimated budgeted surplus of 20bn, the Government was “forced” to make cuts to the CSIRO? And the most prominent cuts to be in agricultural research?
    With looming world food shortages, that is nice timing.

  2. spangled drongo says

    Helen, it’s ironic that if they’d stuck to their knitting instead of playing with their GCM they might have been better off.
    I know we would have.

  4. cinders says

    Does this mean that CSIROs involvement in The Murray-Darling Basin Sustainable Yields Project and the CSIRO Water for a Healthy Country Flagship are going to be cut?

    Not funding this national research program addressing one of Australia’s natural resource issues – sustainable management of our water resources – seems to be totally opposite to the Rudd government election commitments.

  5. SJT says

    “Helen, it’s ironic that if they’d stuck to their knitting instead of playing with their GCM they might have been better off.
    I know we would have.”

    Doesn’t say anything about Aspendale being touched, which is where the climate research is based.

  6. Jan Pompe says

    “Doesn’t say anything about Aspendale being touched, which is where the climate research is based.”

    Is anyone surprised?

  7. Wes George says

    I always have a chuckle when I see Queensland number plates emblazoned with “The Smart State.” But the ACT should start issuing plates with “The Dumb Country” on them.

    What part of R&D does the government not get? Is it the research part or the development? Is it the part where R&D investments pay back treble or more? The US had DARPA and semiconductor R&D initiatives in the 1970’s through the 90’s. Combined with private sector investment they literally created and took ownership of the information age for a few billion bucks. California’s economy is much larger than Australia’s!

    We should ask: Why we don’t own part of the information age? Why don’t we create the solar age? An IBM R&D team leader once said the best way to predict the future was to invent it.

    Instead, we are smugly content with riding the resource boom as a raw materials colony of China. We mistake geological serendipity for clever economic management at our peril. We have resigned our destiny to the fates rather than creating the future in our own image, perhaps because we have lost faith in ourselves as a nation.

    The parasitical bureaucracy of almost every federal agency will almost certainly expand under the Rudd government. The CSIRO will atrophy. That’s a failure of both imagination and leadership.

    If only the Libs and Nats could offer a creative nation-building alternative future.

    dumb and dumber.

  8. Wes George says

    And why do we consistently punch far, far above our demographic weight at the Olympics?

    It’s because we have a culture (and the political will) that cares enough about sports to make the investment effort necessary to succeed in spite of overwhelming global competition.

    If that competitive spirit could only infect our passion for invention and our will to succeed in the free marketplace of ideas, our future would be secure.

  9. spangled drongo says

    Good points, Wes.
    Australia, the care free country.
    When I heard Peter Beattie was thinking of building a desal plant I sent him a simple design of a floating hydraulic pump that accumulated pressure by wave action and converted salt to fresh water on a continuous basis and pumped it ashore with no other energy requirement.
    Not even an answer.

  10. Alarmist Creep says

    What a bunch of predictable right wingers. Both sides of politics have been winding CSIRO back for years and fiddling and diddling with Harvard managerialism instead of science. Agricultural research of the good olde days has been on the nose for yonks – govt view is let industry do it. But in spite of all the kicks in the teeth, they have done quite a few things in wide fields – check out http://www.csiro.au

    But why should kids take up science as a career. You’re all just going to bitch about them being on “THE gravy train” anyway.

  13. Helen Mahar says

    The CSIRO is vulnerable to changing political fashions in its research allocations. Over the last two decades agricultural research has been downgraded (I remember the CSIRO sheep breeding/genetics program being scrapped) while environmental research has been increased. So really, what is new about this latest re-jigging of priorities? What it tells new science graduates is that a research career in the CSIRO is likely to come to a dead end as their field of specialisation goes out of fashion.

    Much safer to seek employment in a Government Department (as a policy advocate) They rarely get downsized. EG the new Climate Change Department.