Science reforms failing before they’ve started, yet again 

“Scientists began last year wondering if their careers were stuck in a process of rearranging the deckchairs on the Titanic or a game of musical chairs. We start 2026 knowing it is both at the same time,” says New Zealand Association of Scientists (NZAS) Co-President Troy Baisden. 

“The question now to ask is how much Aotearoa New Zealand will suffer, relative to our peer nations, as our knowledge and experts continue to disappear when they are needed.”

He adds, “The SSAG reports were very clear in saying failure to support our public research system, its people and their connections, is at the root of our productivity issues and lagging economy.” 

“Sadly, the current reform doubles down on failures of the ministry and successive ministers to support our institutions and scientists to deliver what the public and our struggling economy deserves.”

“Rather than plastering over the failures, there are obvious steps of accountability and transparency that must be called for as we head toward an election. Here, we outline three.”

“After compounding decades of incremental failures and avoiding every effort at foresight and advice based on international norms, we’ve arrived at a big question. Are we choosing to fall out of the club of developed and advanced nations^[1][2] – simply because we won’t invest in our future?

Baisden says, “The election year is a chance to choose our future and demand an escape from endless failures and the loss of accountability we see when successive ministers claim the loss of jobs and capability is an operational issue in institutions, and institutions claim cuts are forced on them by funding provided by the minister and government. No one has a strategic sense of what we’re choosing to lose by pursuing cut after cut.” 

 

“The loss of accountability has spiralled completely out of control:

●      More funding disappears into institutions than goes to scientists, much more in the case of Crown Research Institutes, creating all manner of challenges for scientists.^[3]

●      Key Ministerial advice^[4] confirmed officials don’t understand where the anomalously high ‘overhead’ funding goes, what ‘cross-subsidises’ and have no solutions.

Accountability for public funding is among the most important of five fundamentals that have underpinned the success of national research systems across the eras since the Second World War.^[5] Yet, there seems to be no plan to fix the reality in our CRIs: when a science team finally win the battles for scarce public funding, as little as one dollar in five goes to their salaries and project costs. Government departments, companies and philanthropists balk at covering the high costs hidden in our system. These potential funders, along with researchers themselves, can’t understand why our government doesn’t structure the system to fund and deliver widespread benefits, as peer nations do.

Taken together, the ‘five fundamentals’ have built successful national research systems where stability, independence and accountability add up to much more than the sum of their parts, generating benefits widely touted as 8^[6], 11^[7] or as much as 20 dollars for each taxpayer dollar invested. In our view, the reform has now transgressed all five fundamentals.

It is highly concerning that the recently announced Research Funding New Zealand board appears to have little or no track record in critical areas of our science system including climate change, hazards, the environment, and the social sciences – yet was announced immediately following the loss of lives in the type of storm event climate change will exacerbate.

Reforms which make science less stable and less independent from politics must be contested in the election – continuing to go off track will cost us dearly. We need to change course to avoid the path that continues to see our broken system failing to provide our country with the expertise and knowledge development we need in an increasingly uncertain global environment.”

Co-President Lucy Stewart also observes, “Over the last year, there’s been a lot of focus on the large losses of science roles, yet the crippling uncertainty and difficulty establishing and maintaining careers in science needs more attention.” Accounts from a dozen early career researchers have recently been published^[8] in the New Zealand Science Review, putting details to the bleak outlook.

In subsequent statements, we’ll highlight key topics from our long-standing vision for reform.^[9] Yet as we enter the election year, establishing accountability to support informed debate has become urgent. We highlight three key gaps where the public should expect answers ahead of the election.

First, why do we now have strategic funding bodies that lack key expertise in areas of critical importance? What will we do to avoid losing key knowledge and capacity because decision-makers don’t know what they don’t know?

Second, where is the money going, and why are we unable to say when complex reform has been considered urgent by two different governments over the past five years? What are we cross-subsidising and what are we at risk of losing? How quickly can funds be better used to support careers, science and widespread benefits for the nation – worth many times each dollar invested as occurs in other nations?

Third, why do we have such poor transparency when large research initiatives fail? Sadly, this appears to mean our Ministry simply doesn’t know how to fund them to succeed. We might have begun by asking what the implications have been of losing confidence in and then defunding National Science Challenges? But the same unit has been equally responsible for another large investment, MethaneSat, that has come to grief with inadequate public transparency. It seems apparent that sufficient answers are not forthcoming, and the failure may be representative of wider problems in how MBIE has failed to manage science at scale. We join calls for the Auditor General to investigate and report back ahead of the election.

A failure to pin down accountability in these ways will send us on the path to abandon our membership among advanced nations, and mean the strong science we need for economic stability and growth, as well as to keep us healthy and safe will continue to fall to pieces in the shifting sands of politically driven funding and cuts.

A PDF version of this statement can be found on our statements and releases page. https://scientists.org.nz/press-releases 

[1] https://informedfutures.org/govt-must-look-beyond-political-gains-in-rd-reform/

[2] https://vimeo.com/1143316086?fl=pl&fe=sh#t=6m46s

[3] E.g., https://doi.org/10.26686/nzsr.v80.9848

[4]https://www.mbie.govt.nz/dmsdocument/31287-briefing-0017004-overheads-infrastructure-and-science-services-in-the-new-funding-system 

[5] p. 35 https://nsf-gov-resources.nsf.gov/2023-04/EndlessFrontier75th_w.pdf, see also NZAS Co-President’s address https://youtu.be/Wez15gMIKPI?si=felvGZbLPMhnjomt&t=740

[6] https://www.gov.uk/government/news/55-billion-rd-funding-boost-to-unlock-uk-breakthroughs-from-health-to-clean-energy

[7] https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/ip_25_1115

[8] https://doi.org/10.26686/nzsr.v80.10493

[9] Our vision and strategy formed in late 2020 has proven more robust than any government reform agenda.  Summary: https://ojs.victoria.ac.nz/nzsr/article/view/7803/6946; statement: https://ojs.victoria.ac.nz/nzsr/article/view/7804/6947.