Despite constant rhetoric about innovation, Australia is steadily dismantling its scientific capacity. Public schools, universities and the CSIRO are all under pressure – the result of decades of market-driven policy-making that prioritises short-term cost-cutting over long-term national capability.

Australia’s latest cuts to the CSIRO were announced with the usual language of “efficiency,” “streamlining,” and “budget discipline.” No one in the scientific community believed it. Not because the explanations were implausible, but because they form part of a long, consistent pattern: a country that talks about innovation while slowly dismantling the very institutions capable of delivering it.

To understand why this matters, examine the deeper historical currents that brought us here. Australia’s decline in scientific capacity is not the result of one government or one decision. It is the product of a structural economic philosophy, rational economics that has guided policy-making since the mid-1960s and became entrenched in the Dawkins reforms of the late 1980s.

This philosophy insists that knowledge institutions should be “efficient,” “market responsive,” and “self-funding.” In practice, this has meant steady disinvestment from public goods and an outsourcing of strategic planning to consulting firms whose incentives are profoundly misaligned with national development.

What we face today is the cumulative result: a weakened public school system, financially stressed universities, and a CSIRO repeatedly stripped of long-term capability.

The tragedy is not simply the loss of money. It is the loss of depth, continuity, and trust, conditions that science requires but markets cannot provide.

The national........

© Pearls and Irritations