LAST week’s Australian Budget was disastrous for science—yet again.
Looking back over the eight years I have been writing this column, the Budget
has contained bad news for science in six of them, and the other two years were
mixed.
As usual, any apparent increases are a thimble-and-pea trick. A small rise in
research grant funding through the Australian Research Council, for example,
seems to have been paid for with a cut in the money allocated directly to
research institutions. The funding for the much vaunted biotechnology strategy
has been provided by taking money from the existing Technology Diffusion…
