Pip Hinman
Dr Hugh Tyndale-Biscoe, a marsupial biologist employed by the CSIRO for 20 years until 1995, is one of a growing number of critics of the way the CSIRO handles the balance between its private and public research. He is also critical of the organisation's recent attempts to silence scientists.
Last May, at the launch of his book Life of Marsupials, Tyndale-Biscoe made his concerns public. Since then, other prominent former and current CSIRO scientists have spoken out about how the increasing corporatisation of the organisation is affecting the CSIRO's science research.
"The balance between good public research — which benefits all taxpayers — and research for specific clients is being pushed greatly in the latter direction", Tyndale-Biscoe told Green Left Weekly. "One glaring example is that CSIRO has decided to stop doing research on alternative energy systems, instead concentrating on resources on carbon sequestration to benefit the coal industry.
"As Tim Flannery has cogently argued in The Climate Makers, effective sequestration of carbon emissions is decades away from being used and, even when it is available, the process will use 25% of the available energy in the coal. What is needed urgently is the development of renewable energy sources of all kinds while we ramp down our dependence on fossil fuels."
In an article in the July 2005 Australasian Scientist, Tyndale-Biscoe described how parliament established the CSIRO in 1949 as a statutory body with broadly defined aims and freedom to pursue them. "Its primary functions were 'to carry out scientific research to assist Australian industry and to further the interests of the Australian community'." He added that this has changed because government funding cuts have obliged the CSIRO to find 30% of its budget from other sources.
"Under its current leadership, the drive for even greater external income has led CSIRO to mimic a public corporation. Its senior officers now carry management — rather than scientific — titles and use the language of business by describing users of its research as 'clients', while some senior and still-productive scientists are discarded as 'surplus to requirements'."
But, Tyndale-Biscoe argued, the CSIRO is not a company and was never supposed to be one.
He continued: "Increasingly CSIRO gets external money through consultancies for 'clients' and by 'co-investments'. Both are short-term. In consultancies, clients pay 100 per cent of CSIRO's costs (salaries, research and administration) and get 100 per cent of the research time of participating scientists and technicians, who then cannot tackle core tasks.
"In co-investment, the user provides some of the costs, usually for research, while CSIRO provides salaries and administration in-kind. Thus, the co-investor gets 100 per cent of the time of scientists and technicians for a 50 per cent investment in the research."
This is the key dilemma, Tyndale-Biscoe told GLW, adding that no public services have been immune to budget cuts. "The big loser", he said, "has been high quality, open-ended research that attempts to probe fundamental questions for which there are, at present, no answers".
What is done instead is "second- or third-order research to exploit earlier discoveries by CSIRO and other research institutions. Fostering first-order research is risky, but it is the motor for everything else. Unfortunately, its practitioners are not easily managed or controlled: they need a lot of freedom, which is not good business practice!"
Graeme Pearman, former chief of the CSIRO's Atmospheric Physics Division and an international authority on climate, revealed on the ABC TV's Four Corners program on February 13 that he was muzzled by CSIRO management because he was delivering bad news that the government didn't want broadcast. He was also told that he should not associate with the Australian Climate Group — scientists and industry people who decided to communicate their views about climate change and what could be done about it.
As Pearman explained to Four Corners: "There needs to be a closeness between the scientists, the scientific agency and government that ensures communication takes place, but there also needs to be a sufficient distance." Pearman said he was speaking out because scientists are confident that climate change is real and there needs to be a policy response, and because "scientists are no longer as free to speak as they were".
Tyndale-Biscoe told GLW that before 2004, "CSIRO had a great tradition, fostered by Sir Ian Clunies Ross and Sir David Rivett, that its scientists must speak to the public about their findings, because taxpayers funded their research. "This changed in December 2004. New rules about not speaking to the media were promulgated by the newly appointed CSIRO director of media, Donna Staunton, who has no background in science. She was recruited from Phillip Morris, where she had infamously argued that nicotine is not addictive.
"Since then, the new rules have been invoked to gag some highly distinguished scientists and frighten everyone else."
According to Michael Borgas and Pauline Gallagher, president and secretary of the CSIRO Staff Association, the other big problem for CSIRO employees is job insecurity. In the February 21 Melbourne Age, they argued, "This is a real fear in CSIRO, where annual staff turnover is in the order of 21 per cent, compared with about 5 per cent turnover nationally for Australian professionals.
"Ninety-three per cent of appointments to the CSIRO were on fixed-term or casual arrangements in the last financial year. Job insecurity and burgeoning demands of bureaucracy have forged a culture among CSIRO staff of keeping one's head down, serving the indicators and doing their science 'at night'."
Recently, the federal government used its numbers to thwart a Senate inquiry into the CSIRO. According to Max Whitten, another former chief of the CSIRO Division of Entomology, writing in the February 15 Age, there needs to be an inquiry "now more than ever". He said that, while there are a range of individual reasons for the more recent "exodus" of scientists, "a common thread emerges — an intolerance by senior management and the government to criticism and alternative viewpoints".
As Borgas and Gallagher conclude: "In an era where fear is a growing driver across society, with risk-averse micro-management as a response, we would do well to remember the adage: 'If you can't count you can't fight. If you don't fight you don't count."
From Green Left Weekly, March 29, 2006.
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