Janet Rice (Victoria, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

by leave—I move:

That the Senate take note of the document.

The documents that have been received out of sitting are the final documents that we have received in response to our order for the production of documents regarding the cuts to climate science at CSIRO. These documents have revealed an absolute litany of problems with the process that was used in these cuts to the CSIRO's climate programs and really show what is at the heart of these cuts. The critical thing which is revealed in these documents is the major shift that CSIRO is currently undergoing away from doing science for the public good. There are emails and documents here that clearly show that in the CSIRO of this government the only science that is going to be undertaken will be science that makes financial return. This means for science like climate science and environmental science where the client is 'the public good'—it is the future of our climate, it is the future of our wellbeing of our land and our water, the wellbeing of all of us—if that does not have the ability to bring in the dollars in the short term, it will not be done.

That is the fundamental thing that is very clearly behind these cuts to climate science. On top of this, we then have the incredibly poor process that was gone through with these cuts because of that fact. They did not want to put it as starkly as: climate science is not returning money; climate science is not something that this government is interested in, so we will cut it. They did not want to put it as starkly as that, so we then had the atrocious process that was gone through in order to get these cuts on the agenda. We had the business manager from the CSIRO Oceans and Atmosphere division essentially saying that the direction to cut the core jobs—the 100 out of the 140 climate scientists at CSIRO Oceans and Atmosphere division—was decided before their strategic planning process, the so-called 'deep dive' that a former chief of Oceans and Atmosphere division said was no more a deep dive than having a trip to the beach from Canberra and not even getting your cossies wet.

Even then, we had a deep dive process, this strategic planning process. That resulted in the recommendation to lose 35 climate science jobs out of 140 that are doing this crucial climate science. But then, with no justification, in the month of December, from these 35 suddenly we had 100 jobs that were going to be lost, which was going to decimate climate science. It is 100 jobs out of 140. Only very few scientists are going to be left to do this critical scientific research that is so important for our future as a nation. We have seen record breaking weather over the last month, the last months, the last year, the last decade. We need to know how that climate change is going to impact on Australia in the future. This is fundamentally what our CSIRO climate scientists do.

We have seen in these documents the misrepresentation by the head of CSIRO, saying that climate change has now been proven so we do not need to study it any more, and saying it is now time to move onto mitigation and adaptation. We agree with him. Climate change was proven definitively a decade ago, in 2007. Climate change is real—it is happening. The fundamental misrepresentation that is revealed in these documents, however, is that whereas the head of CSIRO is saying that we need to move onto mitigation and adaptation, that is what our scientists are already doing. In particular, most of the work of the climate scientists at CSIRO has been in the field of adaptation and yet this misrepresentation that the CSIRO climate scientists were not doing adaptation is revealed in these documents. The head of CSIRO has misrepresented it to the board, he has misrepresented it to the minister, he has misrepresented it to the Prime Minister. These documents reveal a fundamental problem in the way that decision making is happening in CSIRO, and fundamentally this is why our efforts to get to the bottom of this are going to continue. We have another Senate inquiry hearing next week and we will continue to get to the bottom of it. This is critical information for Australia.

Question agreed to.