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Most Australians believe they live in a scientific powerhouse. They’d be wrong.
Hundreds of scientists are sounding the alarm over our woefully unambitious level of investment in research and development, which has eroded over 15 years to the point that our quality of life is under threat.
Since a peak in 2009, overall investment into R&D has crashed to 1.69 per cent of GDP, a historic low that runs way below the OECD average of 2.7 per cent and could see Australia ranked last in the OECD within five years. As that value has edged downward, the facilities of Australia’s premier science organisation, CSIRO, have also quietly fallen into disrepair.
The agency’s chief executive, Professor Doug Hilton, will tell the National Press Club on Wednesday that 80 per cent of CSIRO’s 800 buildings are at their technical end of life or not fit for purpose.
Maintenance costs are why the axe has had to swing on 350 jobs despite an additional $387.4 million funding injection from the latest budget, according to a draft version of Hilton’s speech.
Amid feeble funding and slashed research jobs, most with a stake in science agree we are at a crossroads between choosing a vigorous reversal of scientific decline or accepting descent into becoming The Dumb Country.
That’s why the Australian Academy of Science, comprising about 650 distinguished researchers, has marshalled its biggest campaign in 70 years.
Science funding tied to quality of life
Australia is good at waving the flag for science. In 2024, the late Professor Richard Scolyer and colleague Professor Georgina Long were named dual Australians of the Year for their work on melanoma. This year it’s space engineer Katherine Bennell-Pegg.
A survey by the academy showed 86 per cent of Australians assumed our investment in science is on par with other countries. The reality shocked them.
Australian scientists may be world-class, but every stroke of their brilliance – synthetic DNA, new heart-rescuing drugs crafted from funnel-web venom, and ultra-efficient solar panels – has been made despite chronic underfunding, a Byzantine grants system and ailing facilities.
“We haven’t really seen science being an election issue for a very long time, and it’s probably just complacency because the public believes that everything’s doing great,” says Dr Hayley Teasdale, a neuroscience researcher and head of science with the academy.
“But scientists are now telling their kids not to follow in their footsteps, and that is heartbreaking.”
Teasdale knows the feeling of dashed scientific dreams. There was no local work in her field when she completed her PhD in Canberra.
But her expertise was keenly desired elsewhere: a neurotech company in San Francisco hired Teasdale as their lead scientist, to work on non-invasive brain stimulation treating the symptoms of Parkinson’s disease and depression.
She returned to Australia during COVID. “There were no jobs here for me to continue my research in Australia,” she says. “I’ve lived the story.”
Teasdale is now a torchbearer for the academy’s Restore Science campaign, which has rallied almost 18,000 people to write to their MPs calling for the return of research investment to an internationally competitive level.
The campaign follows the release of the Ambitious Australia report, a road map to a bolder, stronger science sector, commissioned by the government and delivered in March. The report calls for the reversal of declining research grants; lifting spending to the OECD average would require a boost of 43 per cent, or $2 billion.
Science improves our lives through cheaper energy, more nutritious food, better medicine, new materials to use and sell, and more biodiverse cities. Without strong science and the urgent diversification of our economy beyond what we dig from the ground, the report warned, our lives in future decades will be worse.
“The imperative for change is clear,” wrote the report’s leader, Tesla chair Robyn Denholm. “Future generations of Australians face a substantial reduction in their standard of living unless there are bold, nation-changing reforms.”
Some reform has followed. Last week, the government overhauled the Australian Research Council’s National Competitive Grants Program – one of the major sources of government science funding – from 15 schemes to seven, and simplified the process to reduce time burnt by researchers applying for grants (which can take up as much as half of a senior scientist’s workload).
But that refresh, and the recent measures in the budget, did not deliver more cash. It just rearranged lab stools on the Titanic. If there’s one thing the report stressed, it’s that incremental change is no longer enough to save science.
CSIRO cuts over, but 10-year upgrades needed
With its axed researchers and ageing facilities, CSIRO has served as a metaphorical microcosm for the broader state of Australian science. But the exit of 800 support staff and 350 researchers – including from the health and biosecurity unit and climate modelling teams – has put the organisation back on steady ground, Hilton says.
Some senior CSIRO staff have said mismanagement of COVID-era funds put the organisation in the red. Hilton says the job cuts were required after previous executives prioritised science jobs over building upgrades.
“I can understand why in the past people have preferenced keeping scientists on board and keeping our research portfolio broad, at the expense of repairs and maintenance,” he says. “But there’s a point where it does become unsustainable.”
Addressing the maintenance and facility upgrade backlog will be a 10-year job, he warns. But he doesn’t foresee any more broad job losses in the pipeline: “The scale of those major cuts are behind us now.”
Speaking broadly about the state of research funding, Hilton says science has to prove its worth against all the other pillars of a nation the government has to answer to: defence, the NDIS, an ageing population, the environment.
“If science wants to contest for [funding], then we genuinely have to ask ourselves as organisational leaders, as team leaders in science, and as individual scientists, whether we’re doing absolutely everything to create the case that we are delivering the best value for money,” he says.
“I think that’s part of being a good steward of public money, and it’s part of the trust people have in science and scientists.”
He, too, sees us at a momentous junction between regression, inaction and forging a new path ahead.
“I’m really sympathetic to the campaign the Academy of Sciences is running,” Hilton says. “But for me, it’s not about restoring science back to something that it was in the 1970s or 1980s. It’s how do we chart a new course for science where people widely across a big continent – in rural and regional areas, in outer suburban areas, in inner metro areas – they can all see the absolutely crucial nature of science in their future?”
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Angus Dalton is the science reporter for The Sydney Morning Herald.Connect via X or email.From our partners
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