Ed Husic has challenged his own government to “pry open the jaws of Treasury” to boost funding for Australia’s national scientific agency after it announced up to 350 research jobs would be cut to deal with an imminent budgetary cliff.
The Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) announced on Tuesday it would cut between 300 and 350 research unit roles as part of efforts to narrow its research scope and address an ageing property portfolio in need of urgent modernisation.
Husic, who oversaw job cuts to CSIRO administration and support teams as the former science minister last year, said “some of the driest of the driest minds within the sphere of government, notably Treasury and finance” saw CSIRO’s funding as a budget cost, rather than an investment in the future.
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“If you do value science, you need to stop looking at science and research as a cost, and see it as an investment in the future, wellbeing and capability of the country,” Husic told ABC’s Afternoon Briefing.
“I think that the task at hand is to roll up the sleeves, get out the jar of gumption and pry open the jaws of Treasury to make sure that our national science agency is funded in the way that will be good for the country into the long term. If you want to find the money, you can find it.
“I mean, we found $600m for a football team in Papua New Guinea. I’m sure we’ll be able to find the money for our national science agency, because that is an investment, as I said, in our future capability as a country, really important.”
Guardian Australia understands many of the roles to be slashed will be within the health and biosecurity, agriculture and food and environment research units. The science minister, Tim Ayres, said nutrition researchers – a team within the health and biosecurity unit – had been identified as no longer needed.
A number of town halls were held with staff on Wednesday with sources Guardian Australia spoke to indicating up to half of the roles being “exited” could come from the environment unit.
The job cuts will add to at least 818 roles lost since July 2024, as CSIRO chief finance officer, Tom Munyard, confirmed in a Senate estimates hearing in October.
The prime minister, Anthony Albanese, defended the announcement on Wednesday, saying his government was a “friend of science” when a comparison was drawn to widely criticised job cuts in CSIRO under the former Abbott government.
Between the 2012-13 and 2015-16 federal budgets, CSIRO’s average head count dropped by 659 to 5,056 staff.
Under the Albanese government, the average headcount rose from 5,514 in 2022-23 to 6,050 the following year, before showing an expected 555-person reduction to 5,495 this financial year.
“The fact is that we support science, and we support the CSIRO, and we want to make sure that every single dollar of funding for scientific research is going in the right direction,” Albanese said.
Parliamentary library analysis commissioned by ACT senator David Pocock in October showed while nominal funding for the agency had remained relatively steady, its annual funding levels as a percentage of GDP has been falling with few exceptions over recent decades and is now at its lowest since 1978.
The treasurer, Jim Chalmers, rebuffed suggestions that the Albanese government could look for more science funding in the mid-year economic and financial outlook to be released in December.
“I am a big believer in the CSIRO. I think it has an important role to play in not just our science base, but our industrial base more broadly as well. That’s why we do provide substantial funding, and we understand that people would like us to provide more,” he told ABC.
In a statement on Tuesday following the announcement, CSIRO’s chief executive, Doug Hilton, said the decision was required to set the agency up “for the decades ahead”.
Hilton told an estimates hearing in October the agency’s budget allocation “has not kept up with the cost of doing science”, pointing to increased costs associated with cybersecurity and a need to refit its ageing buildings.
About 80% of the CSIRO’s more than 800 buildings are approaching the end of their life cycles and Hilton said the agency would be looking for between $80m and $135m each year to replace or renovate them.
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