It is time we admitted that returning our national science agency to 1978 funding levels was a necessary lesson in fiscal discipline that has now been tragically reversed.
I was sitting in the Chairman’s Lounge at Canberra Airport, quietly sipping a perfectly adequate 2014 Shiraz and minding my own offshore tax structures, when the news broke across the terminal television. The Albanese government had capitulated. In a shocking display of weakness, they announced a $387.4 million funding boost for the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO).
And for what? Because independent Senator David Pocock waved a piece of paper around, and tens of thousands of ordinary people signed a petition. Since when do we let the uncredentialed masses dictate the national budget? If I wanted federal economic policy to be decided by a mob of highly educated specialists who actually understand the long-term consequences of their work, I wouldn't have spent the last three decades advocating for the privatization of everything not bolted to the floor.
The central grievance of this so-called "advocacy" campaign was a recent commissioned analysis revealing that, prior to this bailout, CSIRO funding had dropped to its lowest levels since 1978. The scientists and their enablers presented this statistic as if it were a bad thing. To which I must ask: what exactly is wrong with 1978?
Nineteen seventy-eight was a banner year for this nation. Real estate was affordable, the unions could still be robustly crushed by a well-timed legislative maneuver, and scientists knew their place. In 1978, a researcher didn't expect a fully-funded government mandate to look into "climate resilience" or "advanced materials." They were perfectly happy doing whatever it was they did in sensible tweed jackets, occasionally inventing something useful like the polymer banknote, and otherwise staying out of the way of the real adults running the economy.
Returning the national science agency to 1978 funding levels wasn’t a tragedy, as Senator Pocock would have you believe. It was a triumph of management. It was a necessary corrective. For years, I have argued in this very column that the CSIRO has become bloated with people who insist on "measuring" things and "gathering empirical evidence" that directly contradicts the talking points of my most lucrative lunch companions.
The recent cost-cutting measures—including the hundreds of job cuts that saw scientists bravely transitioned into the gig economy by visionary administrators—were exactly the kind of agile, lean-management thinking we so desperately need in the public sector. Why pay a marine biologist a full-time salary to study a reef when you can simply hire a top-tier consulting firm to write a 400-page slide deck confirming that the ocean is, from a shareholder perspective, still quite wet?
Every dollar spent on empirical observation is a dollar stolen from a hard-working management consultant who could have synergized that same data into a robust, billable PowerPoint.
I visited a CSIRO laboratory once, as part of a government efficiency taskforce, and I was appalled by what I saw. There was absolutely no synergy. There were no key performance indicators written on the glass walls in brightly colored markers. There were just complicated mathematical equations and people staring into microscopes. I asked a senior researcher what his quarterly return on investment was, and he started talking about "baseline atmospheric carbon." I told him if he couldn't put a dollar figure on the atmosphere by close of business Friday, he should pivot to a career in commercial real estate. He looked at me as if I were the idiot.
This is the entitlement we are dealing with. The $387.4 million that the Albanese government has now pledged to the CSIRO could have been spent on things that actually drive economic growth. It could have funded a half-dozen feasibility studies into nuclear power plants we will never build. It could have subsidized the expansion of a heavily-polluting open-cut mine. It could have paid for a completely new, taxpayer-funded sports stadium in a marginal electorate.
Instead, the government claims this money is needed to meet the "long-term costs" of the agency. Long-term costs! There is no phrase in the English language more offensive to a modern political operator. We operate on a three-year election cycle in this country. If a scientific breakthrough cannot be conceptualized, researched, peer-reviewed, commercialized, and ribbon-cut before the next polling day, it simply does not exist.
We must also address the dangerous precedent set by Senator Pocock’s involvement in this sordid affair. Pocock, a man whose physical fitness is a daily affront to the very concept of the political class, has built a troubling brand on actually listening to experts.
By successfully holding the government’s feet to the fire on this issue, Pocock has validated the worst impulses of the scientific community: the belief that their work has inherent value. This is a fundamental misunderstanding of the modern Australian economy. Value is not created by discovering a new protein structure, mapping the genome of a drought-resistant crop, or ensuring our national infrastructure can survive the next century of extreme weather. Value is created by buying a three-bedroom house in Sydney in 1996 and selling it for four million dollars today. Everything else is just noise.
I recently sat next to a very senior executive from a multinational resource extraction conglomerate at a charity gala. I won’t name him, but let’s just say he has the personal mobile numbers of at least three cabinet ministers. He articulated the problem perfectly as we waited for our wagyu beef to be served. "We don't need scientists to tell us what's happening to the environment," he chuckled, swirling his scotch. "We already know exactly what's happening. We just need them to stop writing it down so loudly."
This $387.4 million bailout represents a catastrophic failure of nerve by the current administration. They had the opportunity to finally break the back of the empirical method. They had the chance to turn the CSIRO into a boutique branding agency that occasionally licenses the Wi-Fi patent while otherwise remaining quietly deferential to the fossil fuel lobby.
Instead, they have chosen to keep the lights on in the laboratories. They have chosen to pay the salaries of people who will undoubtedly spend the next decade discovering inconvenient truths about our atmosphere, our oceans, and our energy grid. They have bowed to the pressure of tens of thousands of signatures, prioritizing the survival of national scientific capability over the far more pressing need to generate a modest budget surplus.
As a taxpayer, a homeowner, and a man who believes deeply in the power of willful ignorance to drive market confidence, I am thoroughly disgusted. We had science on the ropes, right back where it belonged in the glorious austerity of the late seventies. Now, thanks to a petition and a moment of political weakness, we are going to have to deal with facts again. And frankly, that is a cost this nation simply cannot afford.