Alex Gallacher (SA, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

Will we have estimates? Brilliant! Yes! Post every budget there are the estimates, where we actually have the paperwork which is a metre high and we try to burrow through it to find out what is going on. And when we do find out it is not always borne out. We know now, if we go back to Senator Carr's question, that one of the most fundamental things to Australia's growth and prosperity—the research and development conducted by CSIRO—has been diminished.

We know of 10 things that they have invented over the last 40 years or there about, from wi-fi to Aerogard. We know that there was a considerable sum of money repatriated to Australia as a result of the wi-fi technology and that has gone towards enhancing their facilities. As a member of the Public Works Committee I have been briefed across all of that. But it is an absolute disgrace that when we have scientists who are measuring the ice cap and doing critical work in the Antarctic, and who can show us maps of what the results will do to places in West Australia which are currently growing wheat and which will no longer be able to grow wheat, that the critical science has been abandoned by this government and it was not obvious in the budget. So we need to be able to look at a budget, pull it to pieces and ask the questions. Senator Wong simply asked if that were going to happen. We did not expect a fire to be lit on the CFMEU work.