"[It] appears to have been rushed out the door on the eve of the expected Cabinet reshuffle and could cost our high-performing export sectors dearly by undermining the research that drives their international competitiveness.

"This report appears to signal many further job losses and irreversible losses of expertise.” says New Zealand Association of Scientists (NZAS) Co-President Troy Baisden.

Co-President Lucy Stewart summarises the report’s findings and its problems: “The core challenge faced by the research and science system in Aotearoa New Zealand is underfunding.

After several consecutive years of cuts including around 700 (and counting) job losses, the best proposal the government has appears to be robbing Peter to pay Paul: taking money from all other areas of research to fund technology research.

“The argument for this is that we have a bias towards agricultural and environmental research, ignoring the fact that we are a country whose economy depends very heavily on the environment. Decreasing funding from all other areas will inevitably lead to further loss of capability. If the government wants to invest in technology it should do so. Asserting that the only way to do this is to underfund other research areas to an even greater degree than they already are is an admission that there is no real interest in Aotearoa having a thriving research sector which can serve our society. There is only an ever-tightening spiral downwards.”

Baisden adds: “This report will have consequences that are dire and damaging. We are now expected to accept that our research system will buy lottery tickets in areas of technology we have mostly neglected and fallen behind in, while ensuring that our enduring strengths like agriculture and horticulture face very large cuts.”

“With research now lumped into four pillars, the Primary Industries and Bioeconomy area will face a 22% cut in its current $251m in funding. That’s catastrophic and made worse by sugar-coating, including the suggestion that $42m over 7.5 years for biodiscovery within the Tech pillar will make up for the $56m cut from each year’s budget by 2028. Doing the maths, it might only cover inflation.

“It is very desirable to find $138m to build new platforms of Tech research. But hope is overstated that the shift will have ‘outsized’ payoffs, which may be hard to capture within the motu when this research must go to international markets to succeed. 

“Sadly, to find the funding for Tech, we will gut the three other pillars that all have strong focus and benefits within our nation. Much may also be lost in the gaps between the four simplified pillars. No clear justification is given for cutting Environment and Health less than Bioeconomy. surmise there may be a fallacy operating: officials infer agricultural industry can pay for the research itself, but that is exactly what undermines our competitiveness and leaves us stuck providing commodities like milk powder to multinationals with little value added or captured.

“It is astounding that the logic for such cuts begins (in Figure 1) by comparing ourselves mainly to small advanced economies, rather than our slightly larger competitors in these areas, including Australia and the Netherlands. After considering the high contributions of the bioeconomy to exports and GDP, our government’s research investment is sensible. Cuts put our entire future economy at risk.

“This problem highlights dangerous confusion in the report. We cannot at the same time embrace what has become the internationally accepted approach of picking the clusters of missions we know will build on our strengths, while deprioritising the areas that matter most to our economy and are most successful internationally. The only thing possibly worse than our failed strategy of not ‘picking winners’; is deprioritising the areas where we can build on reputation and success, yet that is what has been proposed. “Almost all of what is proposed, including expectations that areas will be deprioritised suggests that scientists and innovators will remain tangled in challenges and costs from excessive management, ongoing uncertainty as well as political interference and silencing – losing their voice to advocate for either funding or public good using their expertise.

“The report provides what are almost common sense solutions to two challenges: creating a flexible fund with ability to ‘ignite’ new ideas and rapid responses, and measuring what our research system is doing and delivering so that we can better manage it. Sadly both were well developed in institutions a decade ago, and then eliminated as control was centralised back in MBIE and mapped to contracts. Now a new body, RFNZ is to be formed and immediately take responsibility for these? This is not an area where ‘building the airplane while it flies’ normally works out well.

“Beyond cuts to our best performing export sectors, the biggest story in this report is what’s missing. It doesn’t understand the impact the cuts will have on the workforce, international collaboration or the foundational parts of our science system that were emphasised in the SSAG reports. Most of these, such as the infrastructure that is shared across two or more pillars are mentioned only as having been kicked down the road for future consideration.

“Like our many strengths in agriculture and horticulture, our ability to develop Māori research leadership within a number of fields is seen as something that can be abandoned or backburnered indefinitely. The few words provided on this topic make it easy to confuse our past success uplifting Māori and Pacific inclusion in our mainstream research activity with the narrow area of indigenous and Mātauranga Māori research.

“A tragic gap is the lack of integration of across the two hats that Minister Reti has specifically taken on to accomplish this reform. The Universities portfolio was separated from Tertiary Education so that its relation to the research funding system and institutions could be addressed. Despite this advisory group reporting to the Prime Minister to ensure it represents ‘NZ Inc’, universities and their funding are almost absent, except for a note that three of the eight universities stand to lose $96m in funding. One likely explanation for this is that the report represents a thin sign off and choice of scenarios from the eminent group members, and is the mainly the work of a small policy team in MBIE’s underperforming science, innovation and technology area.

“Sadly from the workforce perspective, we’re told that a projected $850m three years down the road, likely to be $800m or less after adjusting for inflation, will somehow have allowed our workforce to build back bigger and better than what $839m delivers today? It seems like magical thinking, rather than science.”