Christine Milne (Tasmania, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

And Adelaide. All round the country there is excellent work being done in solar. As I said, the CSIRO developed the solar turbine technology at the Queensland Centre for Advanced Technology and we are now not going to be able to spend the money in Australia that we need to make sure that we get that technology right and get it commercialised and on the market.

It is about time that the Australian people had an opportunity, through a Senate inquiry, to have a really good look at what is happening with the CSIRO and to see how it has moved from being an organisation for all Australians that was recognised for doing public interest research—and public interest research is the key thing—to being virtually the puppet of government policy, begging industry for partnership money to try and get some of its project work up. As a result, almost all of this work is not in pure research but is designed for industry outcomes, not necessarily for public interest outcomes. That is what Australians will lament.

Look at the response from the agricultural community seeing the cutbacks in research to the agricultural sector. That, of course, was part of it. The CSIRO chiefs are trying to defend it by saying that they had consultation with industry groups when in fact the NFF and others are saying that they had virtually no consultation in relation to the strategic decisions about research in agriculture. So I think this is an extremely timely opportunity for this Senate committee to have a really good look at what is happening with the CSIRO. I certainly welcome that and I think people around Australia would certainly welcome that. It must be so demoralising for the scientists working in the CSIRO when they recognise that suddenly there are going to be substantial job losses from the current workforce and that the shift in research priorities is going to take us back and lock us into a future based on coal and not on innovation.

The government’s absolute pact with the coal industry means that it is actually costing Australia jobs in the long term. Whether Australia likes it or not, staying out of the Kyoto protocol will not make an iota of difference to the rest of the world community. They will move on. Carbon will have a price and when it does have a price all the externalities from fossil fuel generated energy and fossil fuel mining will come home to roost and the competitiveness of modern technologies will outstrip coal. Meanwhile, Australia will have locked itself in and hitched its wagon to an industrial age instead of getting beyond that into the tertiary industries sector that can take us into the future. The CSIRO moved into the Newcastle area to start looking at transitions into a green energy future. It has all come to nought as there is this concession that the CSIRO has to go to partnerships, that it has to go to industry for its money because it lacks funding from government.

We have seen the demolition, if you like, of the reputation of the CSIRO. I think it is incumbent on this parliament to restore the image of the CSIRO, to inject back into it the support of the parliament for increased funding for its futuristic objectives in climate change research. There should be an injection of support for the notion that the CSIRO belongs to all Australians and that it should undertake public interest research funded through the Commonwealth. We must stop this huge concession in our universities and in the CSIRO where we are losing some of our brightest young people to overseas research institutions where they can do public interest research, where they can pursue pure research for the sake of it instead of having to be locked into the priorities that industry set, which may or may not be the priorities for the future, the priorities for the country or the priorities for public interest. I am very passionate about seeing this research organisation put back on its feet to achieve the objectives people in Australia expect of the CSIRO. I congratulate the committee on bringing forward this motion.