CSIRO: does money rule?

IN an article in the July 2005 Australasian Scientist, Professor Hugh 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’”, Tyndale-Biscoe said.

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.

“Increasingly CSIRO gets external money through consultancies for ‘clients’ and by ‘co-investments’. Both are short-term investments. In consultancies, clients pay 100% of CSIRO’s costs (salaries, research and administration) and get 100% 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% of the time of scientists and technicians for a 50% investment in the research.”

Last May, at the launch of his book Life of Marsupials, Professor Tyndale-Biscoe made his concerns very public and then found that his Emeritus-standing as a retired honorary associate of CSIRO was in jeopardy. It seemed to the organisation that their erstwhile employee was speaking out. And so he was … he was no longer shackled by employment in the Public Service. CSIRO Management’s response was to try and muzzle even retired senior scientists and volunteer mentors. It seems such straightforward expression unwelcome, particularly if it is publicly expressed.

Benefit the coal industry

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”, Tyndale-Biscoe said.

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”.

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 the cigarette manufacturer, Phillip Morris, where she had infamously argued that nicotine is not addictive.

Gag scientists

“Since then, the new rules have been invoked to gag some highly distinguished scientists and frighten everyone else.”

This corporate fix works very effectively — it relies on ‘self-censorship’. Punish one individual who errs and the whole cabal of workers usually lose any solidarity with the troublemaker. Being stood down, frog-marched off the premise, instituting industrial action, imposing disciplinary workplace sanctions and/or being reprimanded before peers are classic methods.

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, 2006 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 — intolerance by senior management and 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.”

Self-censorship of Tasmanian science

In small state such as Tasmania, job insecurity and dwindling public funding for science-based activities produces a similar environment where science can be controlled, bought off, silenced or censored. Scientists currently working in or through government agencies or GBEs would appreciate that these mechanisms are used regularly.

One wonders, is the independence and impartiality of scientists engaged in threatened species risk assessment under as much threat as the threatened species they seek to protect?

As the years roll on in this the 21st century, the clash between human development and nature conservation based on threats to endangered species is likely to increase exponentially. In this war on nature, will science be bought off, silenced or censored?

Politics, science and the law are at play here. If the recent publicity over multi-million dollar wind-farm developments versus threatened fauna is any indication, raw politics, aggressive corporate lobbying and leverage will be on display. The beleaguered Orange-bellied parrots are secondary issues here. After the confusion following the Commonwealth Environment Minister’s recent veto of a Gippsland wind farm project, ‘Canberra we have a problem’ megaphones will be sounding off in Victoria and Tasmania. So it’ll be back to those scientific assessments and who might help our Commonwealth Minister for the Environment out … huh!

If the stakes are high, money rules EVERY TIME and science is quietly called off, paid off and relegated.

In the case of out-sourced scientific research, there is the potential for contracted scientists to be professionally and ethically compromised. It’s easy enough to understand how it operates. A public sector employer has a job or a task and you have the required skills; they just want to be seen to have the scientific base covered and you’re it! The rub comes if and when there is a disjunct between their expectation of your output and your actual performance. Under such a system rather than rewarding and congratulating diligence and commitment, it’s more likely to promote mediocrity and compliance.

Science is no different to politics and the law; it too can be open to interpretations and inferences. Science can be manipulated or compromised most readily amongst collectives of insecure, vulnerable scientists who anticipate and censor their findings so as not to jeopardise their jobs. And of course there are the cool-tripping line managers deliberately placed atop these cohorts — the political filters and trouble-shooters through which scientific information is rearranged.

Such cultures of compliance evolve and take root through job insecurity, competitiveness and distrust. Clean, clear science — and the individuals who practice it — aren’t easily bought, controlled, censored or silenced. When money is the denominator and determiner of who conducts what science, then we are all diminished.

I believe it is those public acts of omission in scientific audit (a failure to do something) rather than acts of commission that really deprive our society of important knowledge. I call it ‘turning a blind eye’ and putting on the golden handcuffs. When scientists allow their research to be compromised by third parties and not speak out then our society is corrupted.