Adam Bandt (Melbourne, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

I have a copy of the motion available here. The cuts to sustainable research excellence are going to hurt somewhere in the order of 1,400 jobs. It is not just cuts but speculation that hurts jobs as well because, if you are researcher wanting to start out in Australia, you should know that, whoever is in government, your funding is going to be secure. You should know from budget to budget that the whole of the parliament treats science and research with sufficient importance that it is not going to be tinkered with from budget to budget. Every time there is speculation in the lead-up to the budget it affects the choices that people make and it affects the ability of external investment, especially from the private sector, to join in and invest in world-leading health and medical research that goes on in Australia, especially in Victoria.

What I hope is that we have the opportunity in this parliament to put some of these issues beyond doubt and take them out of the realm of party politics, and that is what the motion is intended to do. The motion intended to lay the groundwork for the budget. It was not even calling for an increase in funding, but just calling for no cuts. That should be something that is very easy to be agreed upon and, if we agree upon it now, it will give a lot of people a lot more security over the coming months. So, I do hope that this House allows this motion to be brought on, not only to allow the processing of private members' business in an orderly fashion so that when we think a motion is going to be voted on it is voted on, but also to give some security to the scientists and researchers around this country that we are not going to come back and raid them and their budgets time and time again simply because we have been unable to secure this country's revenue base.

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