A “long-term, bipartisan failure” to fund CSIRO adequately has left the national research agency in crisis, a Senate inquiry has found in launching its final report, amidst pleas for a “permanent uplift” in funding.

The inquiry – prompted by CSIRO’s November announcement that it would cut 818 jobs and pursue over 300 more research redundancies, despite a $233 million funding boost – flagged “serious concerns about the long-term financial viability of the organisation.”

Last year, CSIRO – whose funding rose by just 1.3 per cent annually for the last 15 years, as inflation grew at 2.7 per cent – said its viability requires over $80 million to be invested annually into “essential infrastructure and technology” for the next decade.

The agency’s workforce, the Senate inquiry report found, is “experiencing deep levels of frustration and distress” over not only their job security but concerns that CSIRO funding “has not kept pace with the requirements of a modern, effective national science agency.”

“Time and again, the committee was told that staff feel they are not being adequately consulted or heard regarding CSIRO’s direction and future,” the report notes, warning that “CSIRO cannot afford to alienate the very people it relies on to deliver its mandate.”

The report offers six recommendations, including urging the government to “clarify” whether CSIRO staff can expect further funding cuts or job losses – a call that Labor rejected – and that it “continues to engage with CSIRO regarding financial sustainability”.

CSIRO should “continue to engage with” staff disgruntled by a lack of dialogue, the report recommended, as well as publicly advise “how Australia’s sovereign, public research capability will be protected in the face of funding cuts and job losses.”

It also encouraged the government to address the recommendations of the recent Strategic Examination of Research and Development (SERD), and “engage with CSIRO about its strategic direction” in light of the SERD findings.

The SERD report published in March made 20 recommendations, warning “talent is critical” and that Australian R&D “will stall without better connections to investors and capital.”

Death by a thousand cuts

A Greens dissent on the CSIRO inquiry by committee member Senator Barbara Pocock flagged the “systemic erosion of Australia’s public science capability” on both sides of the aisle.

The report’s recommendations “do not reflect the evidence received and set out in this inquiry’s report,” the dissent said, noting the “steady squeeze” as CSIRO resources are “diverted away from long-term, nationally significant science toward covering basic operational and infrastructure costs.”

“Taken together,” it said, “it’s clear that CSIRO is not being funded to maintain a fit-for-purpose capability [but] being forced into a cycle of internal cuts, short-term trade-offs, and erosion of long-term capacity.

“It’s chronic underfunding masked as strategic reform.”

Pocock didn’t mince words outside the committee room either, calling the major parties’ responses to the inquiry’s evidence “pathetic” and “frankly shameful.”

“Australia is not just underfunding science,” she said, but “dismantling the workforce and capability needed to confront the defining challenges of this century.”

That workforce is seeing not only the axing of hundreds of scientists, but the departure of executives like digital and manufacturing research chiefs Dr Jon Whittle and Dr Marcus Zipper, who resigned from CSIRO in November.

“Specialised scientific expertise takes years, often decade to build,” Pocock said, and “once lost, it cannot be quickly or easily replaced.”

Where to from here?

The report offers little to a government that blamed previous governments for CSIRO’s malaise, insisting that it “has not cut the CSIRO’s funding” while claiming allegations of poor economic management “are not supported by the evidence”.

However, the inquiry has provided catharsis for Australia’s scientific and research community – which lodged 88 submissions – and in diverting attention from staff cuts to long-term strategic issues.

A new Science & Technology Australia (STA) analysis found declining interest in STEM subjects among school students, growing dependence on overseas workers, and a lack of funding certainty and sustainability driving one in three STEM workers to ponder leaving.

“We need more STEM professionals, but we’re struggling to retain the ones we already have and that’s a direct result of decades-long underinvestment,” STA CEO Ryan Winn said.

He called for action on the SERD recommendations and said “backing CSIRO means backing the workforce, capability and innovation that will drive Australia’s future prosperity.”

With Australia’s R&D investment of 1.69 per cent of GDP well behind the OECD average of 2.7 per cent, there’s much to be done.