Private capital will not build Australia a world-class science system. Only the public sector can do that. And it must do so at a scale that matches the challenges ahead.
The looming loss of hundreds of CSIRO scientists has been greeted with the usual talk of “budget pressures” and managerial decisions. But this framing obscures the real story. What is happening to CSIRO is not a sudden failure of governance. It is the culmination of much deeper, longer-term failures-failures that reach back through the entire history of Australian capitalism.
Australia’s science crisis reveals a century of structural failure