Stop starving our science innovators and let them help us all

I'm disturbed to note that the CSIRO is having its centenary this year while retrenching staff and that Australia is spending about half on research and development as a per cent of GDP compared with the US and the OECD. Subscribe now for unlimited access. Save $100 + Bonus Tote All articles from our website & app The digital version of Today's Paper Crosswords, Sudoku and Trivia All other in your area CSIRO chief executive Dr Doug Hilton. Picture by Karleen Minney There is plenty the CSIRO could do to help Australia productively. In my area the Australian building codes have had little spent on them in recent years and have become unwieldy and difficult to use. Builders often just guess to save turning their brains inside out trying to understand many of these codes. The CSIRO needs to be funded to re-establish the Experimental Building Station to update these codes with tiers. The first tier being simple conservative rules for busy builders, the second tier requiring some calculations and being less conservative and the third tier accurate calculations. The house gutter and downpipe code would be a good start. When are the major parties going to listen to the public whom they claim to represent? Most people's standard of living is going down while profits are going up. What has caused this? The Coalition pushed an agenda of corporatisation of NGOs and councils. Privatisation was encouraged when many social services are best run by government or public agencies. Look at aged care and NDIS - privatisation has raised the cost of a gardener from $40 to $50 per hour to $80 to $90 per hour. Home care packages have to include costs not just for a wage but for the private management structures of for-profit businesses. Both of these systems have become about money rather than service. Business interests have too much say over policies and governance. Look at the gambling and building development industries. They can afford lobbyists. It is a bit like when the management of the "free" press is taken over by board members who are all representatives of big corporations. Whose interests are they going to want heard? Not the public interest for sure. Recently it has been proposed that job seeking should be put back in the hands of the public service because the "for-profit" model has failed miserably. Why is there not a fair distribution of the wealth generated by the mining and gas industries? Again government listens to the b.s. of corporations over the interests of their constituents. Ian Douglas (Letters, September 4) likes to attribute the national debt to the Coalition. Funnily he doesn't mention Labor's request for every Australian who got the COVID-19 jab to be paid $300 from taxpayers' money. You do the maths and see how much further debt this would have put us in. Albanese in opposition complained that the Coalition should extend JobKeeper payments, but when in power he declined to do what he said the opposition should do. He also fails to mention it was the Labor state premiers and territory that unnecessarily locked down their citizens for prolonged periods without medical advice, who then demanded money and got it from the federal Coalition government to cover for their gross mismanagement. He also fails to admit that the Howard/Costello government left the incoming Rudd Labor government in 2007 with a surplus of $17 billion and net assets of $29 billion, who in turn left the incoming Abbott Coalition government in 2013 with a $19 billion deficit and net debt of $153 billion. Former Labor prime minister Julia Gillard wasted half a billion tax dollars to Islamic schools in Indonesia and the cost of 50,000 illegal immigrants let in by the Rudd-Gillard government, many on welfare. Mr Douglas fails to mention the record spending by this current Labor government, even the huge increase of public service jobs that is a massive cost to the taxpayer as well as failed green hydrogen and wind turbine projects, in which half a billion dollars was wasted. Unfortunately, this Labor government has wasted its ammo on ideology not commonsense projects. Unanswered Bondi questions It is becoming increasingly difficult to argue that the questions surrounding the Bondi terrorist attack have been fully answered. For some time, I have privately questioned whether Australia's counter-terrorism agencies have had the resources necessary to manage the threats confronting them. Recent revelations suggest those concerns were not confined to private conversations. A former AFP counter-terrorism commander reportedly provided the royal commission with detailed concerns about staffing, capability and operational capacity, and sought to give evidence. Those concerns now deserve proper examination. This is not an argument that far-right extremism should be ignored. It absolutely must be investigated. Every credible terrorism threat deserves attention. But Australia has finite resources. The critical question is whether government priorities and resource allocations reflected the operational threat picture agencies were actually facing. ASIO has defended its decision to shift resources towards espionage and foreign interference, while reporting has indicated that counter-terrorism's share of intelligence-community resources had fallen significantly before Bondi. That does not prove that any particular decision caused Bondi. Nor should it. But it does raise a legitimate question: "What was government being told about counter-terrorism capability before the attack, who provided that advice, what decisions followed, and were front-line concerns properly considered?" If senior operational personnel were warning that capacity was stretched, those warnings should not be treated as inconvenient hindsight. A royal commission should follow the evidence wherever it leads, including like previous royal commissions have, the uncomfortable questions about government direction, competing priorities and resource allocation. The ACT Legislative Assembly's recent fiscal report gets two fundamental things right: we need to fix our own territory budget first, and secure a much fairer funding deal from the federal government and NSW. As observers of territory governance can readily see, external advocacy means nothing if our internal institutional structures lack real bite. The official report explicitly calls for the ACT government to properly resource the Treasury so it can centrally monitor spending in directorates and agencies. To get genuine financial discipline back, the government needs to return to an independent ACT Treasury operating as a standalone directorate - just as occurred in pre-Carnell days - fully separated from the Chief Minister, Treasury and Economic Development Directorate where it is absorbed. Some critics will argue that the Treasury already reports directly to the Treasurer. But from an outsider's perspective, that misses the point because ministerial reporting lines are never a substitute for true structural independence. When a central financial agency is bundled inside a sprawling mega-directorate alongside tourism and major construction projects, its objective oversight role must be compromised by competing operational priorities. Territory taxpayers and the Legislative Assembly deserve dedicated fiscal advice delivered by an autonomous entity at all times. The arts don't seem to have featured much in your list. Sure, Rosalie Gascoigne and Klaus Moje are there, but where's sculptor and arts educator Jan Brown? You don't have to go far in Canberra to discover one of her works. What about brilliant ceramicist Hiroe Swen? Geoff Pryor? Printmaker Jorg Schmeisser? And that's only a few. And what about Larry Pickering? OK, I didn't like his style, his wit was puerile and his politics weird, but in the 1970s almost every ACT workplace had at least one Pickering cartoon pinned up. He put Canberra on the map when it comes to comic drawing. Letter writer Kellie Sloane rejects the idea that pill testing saves lives, stating, "there is no safe way to take drugs"? Clearly, Ms Sloane has no idea regarding harm minimisation and what it means and merely reiterates the allegory of "ignorance is bliss". Well, ignorance is not bliss for people like Jennie Ross-King, who tragically lost her daughter, Alex, to an MDMA overdose while attending a music festival in 2019. Alex was terrified of police dogs sniffing out her pills, so she ingested them and died. As a person who "dabbled" in recreational substances in the 1990s, I am here to tell the tale. However, I may not have been. There was no pill testing back then. And for those who will respond with "just don't take drugs", please get real - people are going to take illicit substances, regardless of their illegality or not. Fact. Wouldn't it be better if people intent on using recreational substances have the option of measuring the purity of their substances? This way, they are able to make an informed choice. Pill testing makes sense; it does, and will continue to save lives. Simple. Given the aggressive and bullying US trade tactics against our friend, Canada, perhaps Australia should think more about the advice Canadian Prime Minister, Mark Carney, gave at the World Economic Forum in Switzerland. We've been subject to the same tactics from the US so we know how it feels. Middle powers unite! We should all be having pancakes for breakfast with Canadian maple syrup! Thank you, John Hanscombe, you brightened my day on Sunday. If I had my way the whole of The Canberra Times would be like that, with perhaps a single page reserved for the woes of the world. Smiles and handshakes with the Australian PM (September 5) must be wearing a bit thin for Pacific islanders. Despite saying we are part of the Pacific Family, the PM's approval of new coal and gas ventures threatens many Pacific nations. That's a fine way to treat family. Your editorial on the tobacco excise misses the point that once the criminal business lost profitability and moved on, the government could gradually increase the excise without hundreds of thousands of smokers compromising themselves, as at present, by financing crims and shopkeepers intimidated into joining their network. During this time of tragic disaster in Nepal, hats off to the majority of newsreaders who have made the effort to pronounce "Nepal" correctly. What shame, however, that it proved just too hard for most of them to extend the same simple courtesy to people from Colombia during its recent earthquake. "Colombia" is the country - "Columbia" is a sportswear manufacturer. Richard Manderson, Red Hill If the Coalition's solution to the tobacco problem is to make cigarettes cheaper, will their solution to the gambling problem be to provide more poker machines? As we learn from the UN that the world will overshoot the Paris Agreement climate target, it's encouraging that EV sales have overtaken petrol vehicle sales ("Battery pack outsell petrol rivals for first time", September 4). Now we need the government's commitment to climate action to overtake its commitment to coal, oil and gas. Turning on the tap of fracked Beetaloo gas and approving another coal mine has tipped the scales further in the wrong direction. Our future depends on the balance shifting decisively towards clean energy. It has been reported that the ACT government has scrapped plans for a new ice sports centre in Tuggeranong ostensibly because the project would not deliver value for money. Time then for the government to apply the same "value for money" principle to the tram extension project and scrap any further work; anything less is pure hypocrisy. Send us a letter to the editor Letters to the editor should be kept to 250 or fewer words. To the Point letters should not exceed 50 words. Reference to The Canberra Times reports should include a date and page number. Provide a phone number and address (only your suburb will be published). Responsibility for election comment is taken by John-Paul Moloney of 121 Marcus Clarke Street, Canberra. Published by Federal Capital Press of Australia Pty Ltd. 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