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

Australians should be enormously proud of the achievements of our science community and its role in detecting gravitational waves for the first time in human history. I acknowledge the work of the Australian International Gravitational Research Centre in Gingin in Western Australia and give my heartfelt congratulations to Professor David Blair and his team from the University of Western Australia for making a major contribution to this groundbreaking discovery.

Professor Blair has dedicated his life to detecting gravitational waves and his work has been a vital part of the international collaboration. It has been a magnificent collaboration between scientists across Australia and internationally.

The CSIRO was proud to proclaim its role—unfortunately masking the fact that the section of CSIRO that did key work was closed down last year because of budget cuts. The optical fabrication and coating facility in Lindfield in Sydney has been disbanded. This group developed the highly-specialised coating on the lenses used in the ultraprecision instruments necessary for this major discovery. They were acknowledged to be the world's best precision optics fabricators.

Millions of dollars of unique equipment is lying unused, half-finished orders have been abandoned and world-class scientists have been retrenched. (Time expired)