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

I want to welcome and acknowledge all the participants at Science meets Parliament, who are up in Canberra today and tomorrow, and I want to thank them for their ongoing contribution to our wellbeing and to collective human intelligence, as well as, critically, to our economy here in Australia. I also want to thank them for having the patience of Job, because every time the scientists come up here they have great meetings with members of parliament who tell them they recognise the importance of science, and then when they walk out of this building we find CSIRO getting funding cuts of over $111 million; we find science being treated as a political football, with 1,700 jobs and some world-leading science research infrastructure being put on the chopping block just to make a short-term, grubby political point; and we find that, under this government, spending on science, research and innovation is now going to be at its lowest since we started keeping records in the late seventies.

I am sick of science and research being treated as a political football. I am sick of the science and research budget being treated as a honey pot that can be dipped into every time federal governments feel like the budget is getting tight. It is time to put funding for science and research on a multipartisan footing, beyond the short-term electoral cycle. Our trading partners are spending upwards of three, four and, in some cases, five or six per cent of their GDP on science and research. We are languishing at 2.2. It is time we recognised the importance of science and research.

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