Australian Greens Senators' dissenting report

1.1On behalf of the Australian Greens, we want to thank the committee and the secretariat for their work on this inquiry. We would also like to add a personal thanks to all those who shared evidence.

1.2The Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) plays an irreplaceable role in delivering world-leading science and innovation that underpins Australia's prosperity, security and wellbeing.

1.3CSIRO has been responsible for globally significant scientific developments including Wifi, plastic bank notes, Aerogard and the Hendra virus vaccine.[1]Public investment in science and research is often what delivers innovation that lays the groundwork for these kinds of commercial breakthroughs and increased productivity.

1.4Yet government funding for CSIRO’s public research has declined from 0.16% of GDP in 1978/79 to just 0.03% of GDP in 2024/25, worth approximately $193 million (in real dollars) and a decline of over 17% in 46 years.[2]Under the Labor Government funding has only gotten worse and the institution is at breaking point.

1.5The inquiry into CSIRO’s funding and resources uncovered systemic erosion of Australia’s public science capability driven by chronic underinvestment and policy choices that prioritise short-term savings over long-term national interest.

1.6Over the past year, CSIRO has lost more than 800 jobs, and now another 350 full-time-equivalent research roles are set to go. The scale of the cuts under the current government are set to surpass those made under the Abbott government. In the words of the CSIRO Staffing Association, “put simply, CSIRO is barely surviving and needs urgent help.”[3]

1.7The consequences of long-term staffing and funding cuts are vast; including fewer scientists, weaker sovereign capability, diminished climate research, and a dangerous shift away from national interest led research toward research that can be commercially sold.

1.8The recommendations made in the Chair’s report do not reflect the evidence received and set out in this inquiry’s report. That evidence creates a strong case for action. The CSIRO does not need more consultation, it needs additional funding and a new commitment from current and subsequent governments to real increases in the resources available to our premier public science organisation.

1.9In light of this, our Dissenting Report makes specific recommendations for action, with a renewed commitment to the CSIRO. Without this, our science capability will continue to decline, with frightening consequences for Australia’s ability to meet its current challenges, including in relation to climate change, as well as our future challenges.

Chronic underfunding masked as strategic reform

1.10Evidence to the inquiry makes clear that the challenges facing CSIRO are the direct consequence of chronic underfunding by governments. Nominal funding by the federal Government has flatlined over the last couple of decades and decreased in real terms, but this is compounded by other cost pressures.

1.11Beyond headline funding levels, CSIRO faces a convergence of escalating cost pressures including research expenses rising faster than indexation, the growing burden of maintaining complex national scientific infrastructure, and capital and depreciation costs that far exceed available funding.

1.12The consequence is a steady squeeze on core public-interest research capacity, as resources are diverted away from long-term, nationally significant science toward covering basic operational and infrastructure costs.

1.13CSIRO’s funding is being eroded in real terms because indexation doesn’t keep pace with the rising cost of scientific research, particularly in energy, climate, and advanced technologies, reducing its purchasing power over time.

1.14Mr Winn explained:

When your appropriations from government are increasing at two per cent, the price of clean shoes that you wear in a lab go up by 19 per cent, the price of gold you need for experiments is going up by 110 per cent and some of the gases are going up by 100 to 300 per cent - the equation falls apart quickly.[4]

1.15The result is that CSIRO is being forced to cut capability simply to remain within budget.

1.16At the same time, the organisation carries significant obligations to maintain and upgrade a vast portfolio of specialised scientific infrastructure, from laboratories to national research facilities, which require ongoing and often escalating investment.

1.17These pressures are intensified by capital and depreciation costs that substantially exceed current capital funding allocations, forcing CSIRO to absorb the shortfall within its operating budget.

1.18Dr Doug Hilton said:

Certainly, the increases in the appropriation have not kept pace with the cost of doing science, and I think we're also hostage to a hundred years of history. We have facilities that are spread across 45 sites. We have 800 buildings, and more than 80 per cent of them are at their technical end of life. We have had depreciation funding, which is what we use to renew our buildings through capital investment, that has not been indexed at all since 1999-2000, so it has remained at $80 million for the last 26 years. Those are constraints that make it difficult to continue to do the same volume of science on the same breadth of topics.[5]

1.19Taken together, it’s clear that CSIRO is not being funded to maintain a fit-for-purpose capability. Instead, it is being forced into a cycle of internal cuts, short-term trade-offs, and erosion of long-term capacity.

1.20This is not the result of a single decision, but of successive governments failing to provide sustained, adequate investment in Australia’s premier public research institution.

1.21Sustained underfunding is not just constraining CSIRO, it is actively reshaping it. Witnesses described a shift away from long-term, fundamental research toward short-term, applied and consulting-style ‘research’ work driven by funding pressures. Stakeholders were clear that incremental changes will not resolve these issues: structural increases in funding and long-term certainty are required.

1.22Dr Rintoul highlighted the extent of this shift in practice, noting that:

Generations of CSIRO leadership have attempted to cope with reduced appropriation in real terms by seeking external funding. First, the appropriation funding was expected to be leveraged to obtain 30 per cent co-investment. Then it was 50 per cent. More recently, it was at least 70 per cent and preferably full cost recovery.[6]

1.23The model of funding is increasingly shaping what research is undertaken and constraining CSIRO’s capacity to prioritise long-term, public interest science (more on this below).

1.24CSIRO made the case that whilst financial sustainability challenges have accumulated over generations, they have now reached a critical point.

We must also invest at least an additional $80 million to $135 million from our appropriation each year over the next 10 years so that our buildings, equipment, technology and digital assets are safe and staff safety is utmost in our minds, certainly at the board and for the senior management and our leaders through the organisation as well as our staff but also secure and fit for purpose.[7]

Workforce destruction and loss of sovereign capability

1.25Sustained underfunding of CSIRO is actively degrading Australia’s scientific workforce and eroding sovereign capability.

1.26At its core, CSIRO’s capability is its people. Highly specialised scientific expertise takes years, often decades, to build. Once lost, it cannot be quickly or easily replaced. Witnesses repeatedly warned that current funding settings are forcing reductions in staffing and driving the loss of critical skills.

1.27In practice, workforce reductions are being used as the primary mechanism to absorb funding shortfalls.Professor Dobbie emphasised that research infrastructure is inseparable from workforce capability:

It's fundamentally people - skilled people - that take a long time to train and retain, and we want to make sure that there is security and that there is certainty in the long term. That's Australia's strength.[8]

1.28Without that certainty, skilled staff leave, institutional knowledge is lost, and national capability fragments. As Dr McDougall told the committee:

Doing this requires nurturing the staff over a decade or two or three. People don't develop this expertise in five minutes; you don't come out of a university with a PhD and all of a sudden you're an expert in this complicated field. That's what we should be doing.[9]

1.29This goes to the heart of the issue. You cannot solve long-term national problems on short-term funding logic. By squeezing out fundamental science, governments are undermining the intellectual engine that drives innovation, preparedness and national resilience.

1.30The evidence also highlights that once lost sovereign capability cannot simply be re-purchased from the market. In areas such as climate science, environmental monitoring, and long-term national infrastructure, there is no private sector substitute and no international provider that can fully replicate Australia-specific expertise.

1.31Australia is not just underfunding science - it is dismantling the workforce and capability needed to confront the defining challenges of this century.

Climate science is being deliberately undermined

1.32Australia is actively dismantling the scientific capability it depends on to understand and survive the climate crisis.

1.33Witnesses were clear that funding pressures within CSIRO are driving a shift toward short-term, applied work at the expense of deep, long-term climate science. This is not an incidental outcome, it is a direct consequence of policy and funding choices, and it carries significant national risk.

1.34Professor Hogg made clear that this shift has real-world consequences:

While adaptation and resilience are undeniably important, without investing in the proper fundamental science we're going to be adapting blindly to the changes in our weather and climate that we don't fully understand and can't effectively predict.[10]

1.35The inquiry heard evidence that Australia’s climate science capability is both globally significant and locally irreplaceable.

1.36Professor Hogg outlined that global climate models currently cannot agree on a basic question of critical national importance whether rainfall in the Murray-Darling Basin will increase or decrease in coming decades. This uncertainty exists in part because most major modelling centres are located in the Northern Hemisphere and focus on different climate systems. Australia’s climate is different and understanding it requires locally developed expertise built over decades.[11]

1.37CSIRO currently holds that capability. It has spent decades building the knowledge, infrastructure and skilled workforce needed to model Southern Hemisphere climate systems. This is not something that can simply be outsourced or picked up elsewhere. Rebuilding it would take years of sustained investment and the cuts now underway risk losing it altogether.

1.38By cutting fundamental science at CSIRO, the government is not just reducing research capacity it is abandoning Australia’s ability to make informed decisions about its own future. This not only has significant consequences for the wellbeing of everyone living in this country but it will also mean spending more in the long-run.

1.39Dr Doddridge explained that without reliable projections, governments are forced into guesswork when making major infrastructure decisions. “We don't need to worry about funding climate science if we're happy to waste it on misguided adaptation.”[12]

1.40Professor Hogg reinforced this economic dimension:

The more we know about the future, the better we can make these projections, the more we can target our adaptation and the more we can target the funding we provide for that adaptation… the economic cost of adaptation is enormous.[13]

1.41By allowing fundamental climate capability at CSIRO to erode, governments are not just reducing research output they are forcing Australia to navigate the climate crisis blind, relying on models and expertise developed for other countries and other conditions.

Consequences for the workers

1.42The impact of the ongoing CSIRO restructuring is being felt most acutely by the workforce itself, with staff describing a breakdown in trust, morale and basic fairness in the process.

1.43Staff and their representatives describe this as a prolonged period of instability and under-resourcing, with the CSIRO Staff Association latest culture survey shows a snapshot of a workforce struggling with low morale, lacking confidence in the organisation’s strategic direction and still reeling from the impact of hundreds of job cuts to support roles.[14]

1.44Mr Tonks told the committee that there is an “ongoing change management process constantly” but what is “hugely lacking is relevant real detail for the people who are directly affected to be able to give genuine feedback and to have responses to that feedback.”[15]On the same theme, Ms Tonks described the process and pace of change as “dehumanising”, highlighting the cumulative psychological toll on staff.[16]

1.45This concern is reinforced by Dr Rintoul who notes that staff being made redundant are not told why they were selected, despite the existence of criteria, meaning individuals are left without transparency or procedural understanding of decisions directly affecting their employment.[17]

1.46The CSIRO Staff Association has warned that consultation processes are being experienced as insufficient and that workers feel unable to genuinely influence outcomes affecting their roles and teams, contributing to declining trust in leadership and the broader institution.

A deliberate shift away from public good science

1.47The evidence to this inquiry shows that what is currently occurring within CSIRO is an acceleration of a decades-long, deliberate shift away from public-good science toward revenue-generating, commercialised research activity.

1.48Witnesses consistently described a system increasingly driven by external funding dependence, short-term contracts and revenue imperatives conditions that inevitably favour applied and commercially attractive projects over long-horizon national interest science.

1.49The level of external reliance creates structural pressure to prioritise work that can attract funding, rather than work that is strategically necessary for the nation. Professor Hogg was clear that this has direct consequences for Australia’s science system:

It’s fairly clear in the cuts proposed for CSIRO’s environment unit yesterday that this type of public-good science is under threat.[18]

1.50The core issue is that markets do not fund what they cannot monetise. As Professor Scuffham explained in relation to health research, even highly valuable work is often left unfunded or underfunded because it does not generate commercial returns. Much of this work involves improving patient care, hospital systems and clinical guidelines, activities that deliver enormous social value but limited financial return.[19]

1.51When funding is structured this way, fundamental research is not just deprioritised it is structurally excluded. “In order to solve the really big problems that confront the country, we need to ask very basic and very hard questions, and they aren't the sorts of things you can get funded by a local council or something.”[20]

1.52Witnesses framed this as a broader national decision about what kind of science system Australia wants to maintain. As Dr Rintoul put it:

We as a country need to decide what sort of future we want: if we want a future that's informed by the best possible science or if we're just going to take our chances.[21]

1.53That choice is being made in practice through funding decisions that privilege short-term, externally funded and commercially oriented work over long-term, public-good research.

1.54This is not an accident of funding pressure. It is a structural and political choice to shift CSIRO away from public-good science. And that choice carries consequences.

1.55Without sustained public investment in non-commercial research, Australia will increasingly rely on fragmented, market-driven science systems that are unable to address the nation’s most complex and long-term challenges.

Recommendations

1.56The Australian Greens recommend the Australian Government immediately cease and reverse all recently determined and imminently expected ongoing funding and staffing cuts to the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO).

1.57The Australian Greens recommend the Australian Government commit new, increased and ongoing funds to the CSIRO for “public good” science. Further, the Australian Greens recommend that the Australian Government establish a forward funding trajectory for CSIRO that increases research capacity annually in real terms to meet the growing and emerging scientific challenges Australia faces. This trajectory should reflect international best practice in relation to the funding of equivalent bodies as a proportion of GDP.

1.58The Australian Greens recommend the Australian Government urgently establishes a review to address and mitigate internal governance and cultural norms that require scientists to seek new sources of external revenue (clients) to fund “public good” science (for example, but not limited to, climate and atmospheric monitoring and research, environmental research and public health research).

Note: The Australian Greens acknowledge that some areas of commercial endeavour, and any associated scientific or industrial research conducted by CSIRO (for example: mineral extraction or manufacturing), may reasonably and appropriately be underpinned by external revenue targets and that these targets may be reflected in funding structures and sources for these specific CSIRO research streams.

1.59The Australian Greens recommend the Australian Government urgently establish an audit of CSIRO, conducted by the Australian National Audit Office (ANAO), with particular focus on its capital funding situation and the impacts of previous management decisions on both past and projected organisational sustainability.

1.60The Australian Greens recommend the Australian Government urgently establishes a mechanism for the provision of low-or-no interest loans (off-balance sheet) or similar finance to fund capital works and infrastructure maintenance or upgrades as required by the CSIRO.

The intention of such mechanisms would be to alleviate the sustained budgetary pressures these works place on the CSIRO’s operating costs which have precipitated much of the current organisational requirement to find savings.

Senator Barbara Pocock

Member, Economics References Committee inquiry into Funding and Resourcing for the CSIRO

Australian Greens Senator for South Australia

Australian Greens Spokesperson for Finance, Workplace Relations, Jobs and Employment and Public Sector

Senator Peter Whish-Wilson

Participating Member, Economics References Committee inquiry into Funding and Resourcing for the CSIRO

Australian Greens Senator for Lutruwita/Tasmania

Australian Greens Spokesperson for Science, Industry and Innovation

Footnotes

[1]CSIRO Staffing Association, Submission 42.

[2]Parliamentary Library, CSIRO Funding Trends Research Paper, tabled document by Senator David Pocock, 2025-2026 Supplementary Budget Estimates, 10 October 2025.

[3]CSIRO Staffing Association, Submission 42.

[4]Committee Hansard, 13 March 2026, p. 39.

[5]Committee Hansard, 13 March 2026, p. 60.

[6]Committee Hansard, 13 March 2026, p. 4.

[7]CSIRO, Committee Hansard, 13 March 2026, p. 59.

[8]Committee Hansard, 13 March 2026, p. 40.

[9]Committee Hansard, 13 March 2026, p. 11.

[10]Committee Hansard, 13 March 2026, p. 10.

[11]Committee Hansard, 13 March 2026, p. 14.

[12]Committee Hansard, 13 March 2026, p. 28.

[13]Committee Hansard, 13 March 2026, p.15.

[14]CSIRO Staff Association, ‘CSIRO survey results reveal low staff morale and confidence’, https://csirostaff.org.au/news/2025/08/08/csiro-survey-results-reveal-low-staff-morale-and-confidence/

[15]Committee Hansard, 13 March 2026, p. 4.

[16]Committee Hansard, 13 March 2026, p. 6.

[17]Committee Hansard, 13 March 2026, p. 7.

[18]Committee Hansard, 13 March 2026, p. 10.

[19]Committee Hansard, 13 March 2026, p. 24.

[20]Dr Trevor McDougall, Committee Hansard, 13 March 2026, p. 14.

[21]Committee Hansard, 13 March 2026, p. 8.