Peter Whish-Wilson (Tasmania, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

I thank Senator Pocock for bringing forward this motion, and acknowledge that the Senate has just passed a motion for a references inquiry into these job cuts at CSIRO. It's a very important opportunity for us to get to the bottom of how CSIRO got to a point where it had to not only sack or retrench 850 workers recently but also target job cuts for 350 scientists and researchers across the organisation.

In my home state of Tasmania, we have about 400 staff at CSIRO in Hobart. They are absolutely critical to our community down there, to our economy and to our reputation as a global science hub. And this is not my first rodeo on this. I chaired a select committee in 2016 into the LNP's attempt to cut 350 jobs at CSIRO. In that case, we worked out something that's really important and very relevant to this situation. Public good science—that is, science that should be funded by the public, not commercialised or monetised—is the first science to go when we see these restructures and retrenchments. The witness evidence we got back then was very clear: there was an attempt to try to monetise science across CSIRO. Individual researchers, including climate researchers, ocean researchers, environment researchers and water researchers, who are doing this important, public-good science, dealing with some of the greatest challenges of our time, were told by their division heads they had to go out and find revenue to justify their existence. What have we found out already out of the 350 science cuts? Minister Ayres confirmed last Friday that they will be from the Environment Research Unit, which is oceans, atmosphere, climate, water and nature—public-good science. A hundred and fifty jobs out of the 350 will come from public-good science and from the Environment Research Unit. Sadly, most of the 400 scientists in Tasmania are from the Environment Research Unit. You do the maths.

We cannot afford to lose those jobs in Tasmania. We can't afford to lose science jobs anywhere in this country. Science is under siege globally. There's never been a more important time for this country to show that we value science and scientists by investing in scientific research. I support scientific research for commercial applications in agriculture, in AI and across a whole range of difference areas. We do need more R&D and innovation, and CSIRO has a great record in that. That's why we have wi-fi and lots of other inventions. They've come from research from CSIRO. We cannot target and defund public-good science at a time when it's most critically needed. We need to find out how CSIRO got to a point where they ran out of money and had to sack scientists. I'll ask—