Focus on ‘critical minerals’ and cost of science behind huge CSIRO job cuts as staff wait to find out

Some 300 to 350 staff at the nation’s peak scientific body will learn in the next few days if they have lost their job as the CSIRO. The fact that the cost of doing science has risen faster than inflation and a need to re-focus the taxpayer agency on new areas of technology are the driving forces behind the job cuts, the chief executive says.

“It’s a really sad and sombre time,” the CSIRO chief executive Doug Hilton said on Wednesday. But the cuts are needed to “evolve the science we do to really focus on the challenges confronting Australia at the moment.”

“We are looking to focus on a portfolio of things like critical minerals,” he told ABC Radio National this morning, while also making the organisation more economically sustainable.

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Hilton recent years of inflation have made life “challenging” for the organisation as “for the last 15 years” the funding it has received from the federal government has gone up by about 1.3 per cent per annum, which has been about half as much as general inflation over the same period.

“We’re going through the same sort of cost of living crisis as every family and every household in Australia has gone through in the last five or 10 years,” he said.

The jobs cuts this week have been a long time coming. The CSIRO (Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation) had about 300 of its top scientists present their work in September as the agency tried to identify the areas that made the most sense to focus on going forward.

“We want to pick those areas that we know we are uniquely placed to do, and that review has highlighted some of those areas. And so for us, that review was much more about strategic direction of the science than then savings,” Hilton said.

It’s expected about 350 jobs will be axed, with the CEO admitting it was “a very sad and sombre day” at the organisation when it was announced yesterday.

Staff who will lose their job have not yet been informed but will find out by the end of the week.

“We’re doing that over the next three days,” Hilton said.

CSIRO Staff Association section secretary Susan Tonks said it was “a very sad day for publicly funded science in this country”.

“The Albanese government is just sitting back and watching it happen,” she said.

“They are now responsible for cuts to public science that exceed the Abbott government – cuts that current Labor MPs rightly slammed at the time.

“These are some the worst cuts the CSIRO has ever seen, and they’re coming at a time when we should be investing in and building up public science.”

Hilton said while he believed the government “is taking science seriously”, over the decades the funding hasn’t matched what is really needed.

“I think successive governments, over 40 years, have created a funding situation where the level of appropriation just doesn’t go up with the cost of doing science, and that means difficult choices,” he told the ABC on Wednesday.

The CEO of Science and Technology Australia has labelled the job cuts as “disappointing and a step in the wrong direction for Australia’s research system”.

“CSIRO has announced a renewed emphasis on inventing and deploying technological solutions to tackle national problems. But without a continued investment in fundamental research and discovery, there will be no future innovations to deploy,” Ryan Winn said

“These cuts are compounded by the fact that CSIRO also needs to invest an additional $80 to 135 million per year to ensure essential research infrastructure and technology facilities can be maintained. It is crucial these facilities receive sustained funding to ensure they don’t fall into disrepair again.”

The job losses come as the Australia’s Strategic Examination of Research & Development (SERD) is due to report to the federal government before the end of the year.

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