Thunderbirds are stop

The Federal Government is operating in a "fantasy world" and 
has been watching too many James Bond movies, according to an 
Australian researcher. "It reminds me of the Thunderbirds 
[television program]", said Dr Michael Borgas, President of the 
CSIRO Staff Association. "You have all these gung-ho dynamos and 
[Thunderbirds character] Brains has to come up with the gadget 
that's going to save everyone in some room out the back.

"It's the mentality that drives these narrow minded research 
models. Every project is supposed to have a commercial outcome 
and if it doesn't it's a pariah.

"It's a fantasy world and it will fail. Science will supply 
'winners' if you support people, rather than standing over them 
with a whip."

Dr Borgas was commenting on moves by the Federal Government to 
withhold research funding unless it offered a commercial outcome.

The allegations follow the release of the Federal Government's 
science and innovation package and moves to cut funding from Co-
operative Research Centres (CRC) if their research is not linked 
to "commercial" outcomes.

The move has been labelled a "disaster" even by the Federal 
Government's own backbench and has seen funding cut for research 
into the Great Barrier Reef and tropical rainforests, amongst 
others.

While Dr Borgas labelled not commercialising any research as 
"quite silly", he said that there was no "magic formula" to 
research and that the Federal Government's policies had made 
researchers "totally risk averse".

"It works only if people are able to be confident that they're 
going to have a job", he said.

Unions representing research staff in the CSIRO and public 
universities say the need is for the Government to inject 
sufficient funding to arrest Australia's decline in research and 
development spending relative to our OECD competitors.

"The whole of CSIRO is in desperate need of increased funding", 
said Dr Borgas. "CSIRO is losing science capability right now."

Reports the Government is planning to introduce a Strategic 
Research Council are of concern to research workers, who claim 
that universities and CSIRO are already directly accountable to 
Government and resources need to be targeted at the researchers 
themselves, not bureaucracy.