Emphasis on short-term gains worries Australia’s science community

The most severe cuts are to the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO), which does basic and applied research across many fields. The government provides 60% of CSIRO’s budget of roughly Aus$1.25 billion, and 40% comes from industrial contracts and patent earnings. (Wi-Fi, which was developed by CSIRO radio astronomers and information technology researchers, has brought in hundreds of millions of dollars.) The latest budget slashes CSIRO funding by Aus$111 million over four years. And the organization estimates that the cuts to public funding will lead to additional losses in external revenues of Aus$49 million annually. The previous government had already tightened the CSIRO belt, and over the two years ending 30 June 2015, the organization will cut its staff by 20%, from 6477 to 5200.

“There is no area of science that is untouched,” says Sam Popovski, secretary of the CSIRO staff association. Cuts are being applied to solar research, climate change adaptation, astronomy, marine biodiversity, nanoscience, high-performance metal industries, liquid fuels, and more. “It’s hard to give exact figures,” Popovski says. “It’s evolving. The implications of cuts come through every day.”

Lewis Ball, director of astronomy and space programs at CSIRO, says astronomy took a 15% hit in funding this fiscal year. In making cuts, he says, he is trying to protect the Square Kilometre Array (SKA) and ASKAP, Australia’s SKA pathfinder telescope. Still, CSIRO has abandoned plans to hire a chief scientist for the SKA, and several telescopes will be used less or phased out earlier than had been planned (see photo on page 26). “The rapid reduction of funding this year is unhelpful, but it hasn’t changed the overall direction” for CSIRO astronomy, Ball says. The space part of his portfolio involves tracking spacecraft; it is not affected because it is funded by NASA (see “The Deep Space Network at 50,” by Joseph Lazio and Les Deutsch, on page 31 of this issue).

University researchers, for their part, have their eyes on the ARC, which funds research across many fields. The 2014–15 ARC budget was cut Aus$75 million, or 3.25%, and its competitive grants program was pared from Aus$887 million to Aus$879 million. The success rate for grant applicants, which had been about 20%, will likely drop to roughly 18%, according to ARC chief executive officer Aidan Byrne. But, he says, “the situation is not dire. The challenge is that there are not many other sources of funding. That causes tension in the system.”

Researchers, however, see things differently. Grants are funded at such low rates, says University of Melbourne physicist Steven Prawer, “that confidence is being eroded. Success is seen as having a large luck component.” And, he says, new and innovative but risky ideas are not getting funded. The message to younger people is that “a career in research is not a realistic option.”

Tanya Monro, founding director of the new Centre of Excellence for Nanoscale Biophotonics at the University of Adelaide, notes that earlier this year 750 applications came in for just 10 postdoctoral positions. She also notes that among the 200 or so researchers in the university’s School of Chemistry and Physics, only about 25 are tenured faculty members. “Nontenured researchers certainly have tenuous career pathways,” she says.

A large proportion of the research funding is for only one or two years, says Rob Robinson, president of the Australian Institute of Physics. “One ends up hiring people on short-term contracts, which inevitably means that we sometimes do not attract the best candidates or that they leave science for more fertile parts of the economy.” Until a few years ago, says Stephen Buckman, director of ANU’s Research School of Physics and Engineering, the National Collaborative Research Infrastructure Strategy (NCRIS) “had a two- to three-year funding landscape for major research equipment but now there is uncertainty from that having collapsed to a year-by-year budget for science.” The NCRIS supports shared facilities in areas ranging from marine observation to plasma physics.

Another sore point is money for international travel. The Australian government used to fund travel to work at facilities or meet with collaborators. That pot of money dried up in 2011 and has not been renewed. Instead, the government at the time set aside funding for researchers to travel to India and China. That arrangement is largely seen as political, and scientists resent that they can’t get money to go wherever the best science is. The earlier scheme “was not a lot of money,” says Buckman. “But combined with other funds, it really enabled a strong international presence for Australia.” For example, he says, over the three years he had funding from the International Science Linkages program, “we had something like 50 visits with our European collaborators and more than 70 publications.”

A hotly debated issue is the deregulation of university tuition. At present, university tuition is set by the national government, and all Australian universities receive the same government subsidy per student in a given discipline. But the government wants universities to raise money for research by charging more for undergraduate tuition. “Most universities realize that deregulation is the only way forward,” says Byrne. “Either that or re-regulate the number of student places.”

Not surprisingly, the prospect of higher university tuition is controversial. People anticipate that tuition could price out economically disadvantaged students, that the new scheme will push students to choose their field of study based increasingly on perceived lucrativeness rather than intellectual interest, and that the best universities will do fine but others will have a hard time attracting students. In a bill that is yet to be voted on, the deregulation proposal has been linked politically with the continuation of a grants program for mid-career academic researchers, called “future fellows,” and support for shared scientific facilities.

If the package bill passes, NCRIS will get Aus$150 million; it’s currently funded with Aus$186 million over two years. That extension in funding would be “excellent news” for many facilities, says Robinson. “But it’s only for a single year. We really could do with more predictable ongoing funds.” The future fellows program funds academics who are 5 to 15 years post-PhD for five years, with the expectation that the host university will keep them on. The program was started a few years ago and is winding down, but the package bill would make it permanent, with 100 new fellowships awarded annually. The senate began debating the bill in late October. Observers say it is unlikely to pass on the first try.

Bachor notes that the funding problems lie in “the labeling of the money as much as in the actual money.” For example, CSIRO took delivery this year of a vessel for marine investigation. Counting the Aus$80 million price tag of the vessel, on paper CSIRO has more funds this year than previously. But it actually has less money available because other areas of the organization will have to be raided to pay to operate the new vessel.

Another example is with ARC funding; the government decided that Aus$126 million will go to new research programs in dementia, diabetes, tropical health, and Antarctic research. “Due to the reprioritization of funding for these special initiatives there is less funding available for award through our core schemes,” the council’s Byrne says.

“The government is shifting weights from fundamental long-term research toward short-term research with immediate gains,” says Bachor.

Science advocates and researchers in Australia point to their country’s poor rankings by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). For example, out of 20 advanced economies it ranked ahead of only Greece and Slovakia for R&D investment as a percentage of GDP in 2013. And the OECD ranked Australia last for “business collaboration within higher education and public research agencies,” Schmidt noted in his 28 August lecture for the Australian Broadcasting Corp’s “Big Ideas” radio series. “We have the capacity to get a lot more for our research dollar if we get that part of the equation correct,” he said.

Australia’s science community widely acknowledges that interactions between research and industry need to be improved. “Lack of venture capital and the paucity of opportunities for young people to translate science into businesses via startups is a big hole in the Australian system,” says Prawer.

Matthew Hole, a plasma physicist at ANU, notes that the catch phrase for the current government is “Australia is open for business,” and that the government is “interested in industry and commercialization.” But in that case, asks the science community, why slash CSIRO’s budget? And why did the government cut Aus$80 million over four years from Cooperative Research Centres, collaborative efforts among industry, research organizations, and universities whose raison d’etre is to bring research to market? “There are a lot of contradictions,” says Schmidt.

In his “Big Ideas” lecture, Schmidt noted that, “in 2008, for every dollar in pure basic research that Australia spent, we spent $5 in strategic basic research … and $10 on applied research. And the push today is to move even more money from fundamental to the strategic and the applied.” He also noted that directed research is good at improving what is already known, but “it turns out not to be very good at uncovering the new things that can lead to revolutions in our understanding.” Without the correct balance of pure and applied research, he said, “the revolutionary ideas that empower breakthroughs will dry up, and the government will end up getting far less from its research dollar than it does now.”

“We need a fundamental change in how universities interact with industry. We need a change in culture,” says Schmidt. “The question we are all asking ourselves is, What is the government’s plan to work with industry and develop new industry? You can’t just add a program and expect it to purr.”

Ian Chubb, Australia’s chief scientist since 2011, campaigns tirelessly for science. His recent 44-page document, Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics: Australia’s Future, puts forth recommendations as a follow-up to his strategy paper from last year. In the recent document he writes, “The end we aim to achieve is to build a stronger Australia with a competitive economy. We will need to facilitate growth in ways and on a scale that we have never achieved before. It is time to do what so many other countries have already done: take a long-term strategic view of STEM’s pivotal role in securing a stronger Australia.”

Chubb’s efforts may finally be gaining traction. For example, his recommendations are on the agenda of the Commonwealth Science Council, a new advisory body made up of representatives from government, industry, and science. “I’ve gotten signs that the government wants to do more for science,” says Schmidt, an appointee to the council. “We can’t have everything we want, but it would be good to plan sensibly instead of having to stab in the dark about what may be around in the future.” The uncertainty and lack of money are already having an impact, he says. “You can’t have a vacuum for three years and have no impact. People are leaving the country. But if we act quickly, we’ll curb the damage. We hope we can build up capacity and not erode it further.”

Monro, also a council member, says the formation of the new advisory body is promising. “We have to get out the message of the importance of science. We have to alleviate the cultural and structural barriers to scientists getting closer to industry.” If things go well, she says, the new council “could tackle some of the issues.”