Alannah Mactiernan (Perth, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I move:

That this House:

(1) recognises that in its 2015 budget, the Government has slashed investment in science, research and innovation agencies and programs, including cuts of:

(a) $114 million from the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation;

(b) $75 million from the Australian Research Council (ARC);

(c) $27.5 million from the Australian Nuclear Science and Technology Organisation;

(d) $80 million from Cooperative Research Centres;

(e) $173.7 million from the Research Training Scheme;

(f) $260 million from the abolition of Commercialisation Australia;

(g) $84 million from ceasing National ICT Australia funding from 2016;

(h) $120 million from Defence Science and Technology Organisation;

  (i) $16.1 million from Geoscience Australia;

(j) $7.8 million from the Australian Institute of Marine Science;

(k) $263 million from Sustainable Research Excellence for universities;

(l) $27 million more from the Cooperative Research Centres program; and

(m) $27 million from its own Entrepreneurs' Infrastructure Programme;

(2) calls on the Minister for Education to explain the decision to provide $4 million in funding for the establishment of the Bjorn Lomborg Australian Consensus Centre at the University of Western Australia without any reference to the ARC; and

(3) condemns the Government for the lack of transparency around the decision to fund the research centre, while at the same time making significant funding cuts to science, research and innovation.

Today I want to speak particularly about the Bjorn Lomborg centre and the whole process that led to the federal government investing $4 million in this project. hat came out of the estimates hearing is that this was a process whereby Lomborg's consensus method—the ironically named 'consensus method'—was proved in abstraction, without being attached to any university that would be prepared to use it. So it was not as if UWA entered into an arrangement with Dr Lomborg and that an application of some type went forward to the government. No, somehow or other, through a process that no-one understands, Dr Lomborg managed to get his methodology before some agency—we know it was not the department of education—and to get approval sometime between May and July 2014 for $4 million without any reference to any peer review and without the involvement of the Australian Research Council or anybody else. He was then told to go out and shop it around Australia's universities to see if he could find someone who would use it.

That is an extraordinary process. We are not able to get any information from the government about this. FOI applications come back with absurd price tags. For the last one, the department of education wanted $1,672.50 in order to provide any documentation. We need to know how this happened—how this very controversial methodology, without any university in Australia having embraced it, received funding.

We know that there have been some very serious critiques of this methodology, which involves bringing together a panel and deliberating the different issues and doing cost-benefit analyses. We know that the selected panellists do not represent a broad cross-section of people, they have been heavily weighted towards the politically conservative, and progressive laureates have not been invited. We note that the panel consists entirely of economists and does not incorporate natural science or engage public health specialists or engineers in the process, and 90 per cent of the papers are also prepared by economists.

The very formula of the cost-benefit analysis on which this is based is an entirely inappropriate tool for assessing aid policy because built into it is the notion that the lives of the wealthy have more value than the lives of the poor. So the cost-benefit analysis weighs up the cost and the benefit, but the cost is based on the additional value of your life; and, if you are a very, very poor person in remote Africa, your life is not valued as highly in economic terms as someone from the Western world. So, the poorer you are and the further you are away from resources, the harder it is for the resources to be delivered to you and the lower you will rate. This is an entirely inappropriate technique for assessing foreign aid.

The other thing that is very alarming is that in many cases it appears that the panel's conclusions are at odds with the evidence considered. When Jeffrey Sachs from Columbia University looked at the papers that went into the formulation on climate change, he came up with a two to one cost-benefit ratio. The opponents actually supported an emissions scheme, but somehow or other the panel concluded that a global carbon tax was a bad investment. So there is a disconnect between the deliberations and the final panel decision.

The government loves to go about claiming, 'But you did the same thing; you made these same decisions.' But under the Labor government, in each instance that has been quoted, the decisions involved reputable Australian universities. The funding for the Whitlam Institute, a pre-established institute, was to house it at the University of Western Sydney. The Conversation had already been launched, with the CSIRO and three eminent universities in Australia— (Time expired)

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