THE Minister for Science, Senator Chris Schacht, has been too hasty with his submissions on the CSIRO and the Australian Nuclear Science and Technology Organisation. Moreover, his submission is going to the wrong place, and probably for the wrong reasons.
Senator Schacht plans to take three divisions from the CSIRO _ oceanography, fisheries and atmospheric research _ and to amalgamate them with the Townsville-based Australian Institute of Marine Science to form a new organisation which would be based in Adelaide or Perth. ANSTO would then be merged with what is left of the CSIRO.
The latter part of the plan is expected to go before the expenditure review committee of Cabinet this week. It seems idiotic to put a major reorganisation of Australia’s public scientific bodies to an expenditure review committee. The timing, too, is foolish. ANSTO runs Australia’s only nuclear reactor at Lucas Heights. A review panel has just finished public hearings on whether the reactor should be replaced at a cost of between $200 million and $360 million. Surely, that issue should be resolved before the Government launches on a revamp of the organisation that runs it.
The scientific community is rightly outraged that such a proposal should come to light without views from CSIRO and ANSTO being sought. Indeed, the scientific community must be getting fed up with short-sighted, policy-on-the-run behaviour of government over the past decade.
The Schacht plan looks like about Cut No 783 in a program of Death by a Thousand Cuts for the CSIRO. Its headquarters have been moved and it has been subjected to incessant funding cut-backs and an obsession by government for backing industrial and commercial winners in research _ an attitude which damns pure research and is self-defeating anyway because the best commercial applications invariably come from serendipity in an environment of creative pursuit of knowledge. They rarely come from intentional focused research. ANSTO and its predecessor, the Australian Atomic Energy Commission, have been equally tortured by being subjected to five reviews in 15 years.
Doubtless the two organisations could do far more and far better science with the money they receive. The reason for that is obvious. In the past decade or so the poor, hassled scientists in them have spent so much of their time and emotional energy over shake-ups or threats of shake-ups and in defending their funding or applying for funding that they have much less time and energy left for getting on with the job of science. How much work was done, one wonders, at the Australian Institute of Marine Science this week after the news of its possible move to Adelaide or Perth was made public?
It is time to end the incessant, destructive, bureaucratic meddling with Australia’s scientific organisations. Changes from time to time are necessary, but they should not come about through surprise papers from the minister’s office. Rather they should come about after thoughtful consultation with the bodies concerned and the scientific community generally.