Kim Carr (Victoria, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister Assisting the Leader for Science) Share this | Hansard source

I move:

That the Senate take note of the answers given by ministers to questions without notice asked by Opposition senators today.

Debate ensued.

Question put and passed.

Since taking office a year ago, the Abbott government has shown its profound hostility to science and the role of scientific advice in public policy. This is a government that demonstrates no understanding of the importance of science to the industrial and social transformation of this country. This is a government that has no effective science strategy, no commitment to science research infrastructure, no commitment to a scientific labour force strategy and no interest at all in scientific and industrial collaborations. This contrasts with the previous government, which had a comprehensive 10-year innovation strategy and which increased support for science and research by 35 per cent during our time in office.

This is a government that has, in fact, cut the budgets of the CSIRO and our other national science agencies, and it has threatened just recently to further cut university research because it cannot get its way in regard to its vandalism of the Australian university system. But the most blatant display of contempt we have seen from this Prime Minister is his refusal to seek advice from those who are given the task of advising him on science. The Prime Minister's Science, Engineering and Innovation Council has not met since the election. Since it was formed in 1989 as the Prime Minister's Science Council, the council has played an indispensable role in policy formation under both coalition and Labor governments. It provides a whole-of-government approach, coordinating advice from a range of agencies and experts.

You can contrast this Prime Minister's attitude with that of the Labor Party and the Labor government, but I do not think this government would take much notice of that. What you can do is contrast sharply the attitude of this Prime Minister to that of the previous Liberal Prime Minister, Mr John Howard. He understood the importance of this council and treated the council's work with great seriousness. I am led to believe that he took the responsibility for expanding the functions of the council during his tenure and gave it much greater resources. It hardly ever missed a meeting throughout the period of the previous conservative government.

This is in sharp contrast to the action of the Abbott government. He prefers to take the advice on scientific matters not from scientists but from ideologues and business leaders such as Maurice Newman or Dick Warburton. These are people who are climate change deniers or climate change sceptics and, of course, ideologues in the war against science. It is strange indeed that the position appears to have been undermined so dramatically under this government. Sadly, on critical issues we see that the government is in the grip of the merchants of doubt—the merchants who, of course, have been championed by the former member for Indi, Sophie Mirabella, when she was in fact the shadow minister for science, who took the view that there had to be a vendetta against the CSIRO, that there had to be an attack upon the very principles of evidence based research and that there ought be a war against science because scientists in this country had the temerity to actually suggest that we had to have a meaningful response to climate change.

This is why this is a government that has cut the budget of CSIRO by $114 million and cut $120 million from the Defence Science and Technology Organisation and $16 million from Geoscience Australia. This is a government that has taken the better part of $2 billion out of the innovation programs that assist industry with transforming itself by taking advantage of scientific discoveries and new technologies. In total, this budget has cut some $836 million specifically from scientific programs. We have seen the better part of 1,000 scientists lose their job, yet this is a government that claims it is interested in a cure for cancer. How can you have a cure for cancer when you have so little understanding of the fundamentals of science? (Time expired)