Kim Carr (Victoria, Australian Labor Party, Minister for Innovation, Industry, Science and Research) Share this | Hansard source

No, Senator Brown, that is not the case. What I have indicated is that the government has increased support for CSIRO quite substantially and it has encouraged, through the Super Science Initiative and other initiatives, a breadth of approach to scientific policy in this country that we have not seen in the previous generation. So it is simply not true to say that the government is narrowing its focus. It is true to say that we rely on CSIRO management to work within the scientific community to ensure that priorities are appropriate to meet the strategic needs of this country. We rely on CSIRO, which is our leading scientific agency, to ensure it is able to respond to the challenges that are emerging in this country. We simply cannot rely upon a presumption that what occurred in the past— (Time expired)