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| Labor senator Kim Carr says some CSIRO answers to Senate estimated 'defied belief'. Photo: Alex Ellinghausen |
The drive to increase the share of CSIRO funding from external sources is turning Australia's premier scientific research institution into "a glorified consultancy", Labor's shadow industry minister Kim Carr said.
Senator Carr said the current round of job cuts, which will fall particularly hard on the CSIRO's climate change programs, revealed a distortion of the organisation's mandated role.
Of the roughly $500 million raised each year from external sources, only about $70 million came from the private sector. Since the bulk of the remainder came from federal agencies, the CSIRO is vulnerable to sharp cuts to funding - as has occurred during the Abbott-Turnbull years, Senator Carr said.
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| Fiji, hard hit by Cyclone Winston last week, has had Australian help with climate projection. Photo: APO |
"Setting external [funding] targets is a farcical way to determine priorities," Senator Carr said. "It's an attempt to turn the CSIRO into a glorified consultancy."
"It's an assault on public benefit research and distorts the priorities of public-good science."
Senator Carr said he plans to hold the CSIRO management to account for what he viewed as misleading comments made at Senate estimates by Chief Executive Larry Marshall earlier this month.
When asked by Senator Carr whether CSIRO had reimposed external revenue targets, Dr Marshall, according to Hansard, replied: "We do not have a target."
"Claiming that they don't have external revenue targets defies belief," Senator Carr said.
The CSIRO told Fairfax Media that it plans to correct the record.
"The [Senate] hearing covered the topic of external revenue with questioning covering the time period of more than a decade," a CSIRO spokesman said. "Having reviewed the Hansard record, CSIRO believes that there are some parts of the Hansard record that could benefit from some clarification and is preparing a letter to the Chairman of the Committee."
"I'm deeply disappointed that it's taken so long to correct the record," Senator Carr said.
The CSIRO has been under pressure to explain the rationale behind plans to slice 350 jobs, with about 200 of them to come from Oceans & Atmosphere and Land & Water divisions. Many of jobs to go are climate scientists.
Dr Marshall has said that, since climate change had been proved, more funding could be spent on efforts to curb future global warming by limiting carbon emissions. Additional spending could also go to prepare for adaptation efforts to the future changes, such as more extreme weather, that are virtually inevitable.
Insiders, though, say that adaptation programs, such as the 18-member climate projections team, are at risk.
"It seems to be a strange place to start pruning," Lynne Turner, an associate professor at the University of Southern Queensland, said.
Prof Turner, formerly head of Queensland's Climate Change Centre of Excellence before it was closed when Campbell Newman's Liberal National Party took office in 2012, said every regional natural resource management group in the country used CSIRO's climate projections to inform their long-term planning.
"It's hard to turn that capacity on and off like a tap," Prof Turner said, adding CSIRO's modelling of projected changes to temperature, sea level, rainfall and extreme events was also a service to poorer neighbours in the South Pacific.
"These are highly vulnerable countries, with low technical expertise, which have been highly reliant on a big countries like Australia," she said.
Independent MP Andrew Wilkie is also likely to pursue Science Minister Christopher Pyne's answer to him in Question Time this week that while CSIRO would make 350 people redundant, "350 positions will be opened up".
Land & Water staff were told in an all-staff meeting this week that new hires were dependent on the division meeting revenue targets. Any shortfall could see further cuts, a senior scientist told Fairfax Media.
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