Scientists in fields ranging from astronomy to nanotechnology and cancer research face an uncertain few months with at least $150 million in funding tied to the Abbott government's blocked higher education reform bill.
The Senate's move earlier this month to stymie the government's controversial higher education package has had collateral impact of threatening to halt funding for the National Collaborative Research Infrastructure Strategy (NCRIS) and other key research, scientists said.
The NCRIS funding of $150 million for the 2015-16 year was announced in the May budget, extending the annual expenditure for another year. Scientists were banking on the government being able to arrange multi-year funding for future programs to avoid the annual threat of disruption that comes with each budget. Instead, that threat has come early this year.
"All we want to get is some certainty, so we can do some planning," Tim Clancy, director of the Terrestrial Ecosystem Research Network, said. "It would be a massive tragedy if we lost the underlying capability."
NCRIS helps underwrite everything from biosecurity intelligence, the Synchrotron in Melbourne and the Integrated Marine Observing System which researches climate change in the Southern Ocean and elsewhere.
Nobel laureate and Astronomy Australia's chair Brian Schmidt said that without the money promised to them for the next financial year the not-for-profit company - which partly funds most of the country's telescopes, including the precursor to the Square Kilometre Array, ASKAP, and the Murchison Widefield Array - would likely shut down.
"Australia has been at the forefront of astronomy since the 1940s, [and] we're on the threshold of throwing that away," said Professor Schmidt.
A spokesman for Education Minister Christopher Pyne declined to detail what if any contingency the government had in case the higher education bill gets blocked again when parliament resumes in February.
Mr Pyne recently warned in Question Time that NCRIS and the Future Fellowships schemes for mid-career researchers were at risk of being frozen if his bill was blocked. "Up to 1500 Australians will lose their jobs in the years ahead in research in Australia because Labor opposes the reform bill," Mr Pyne said.
Fairfax Media also sought a response from the Education Department about whether the funding for NCRIS and other recipients of science assistance could be stripped out of the bill to provide continuity – a move scientists are calling for.
"We're hopeful Christopher Pyne can just release this paperwork," one program manager said.
One example of operations at risk is the Ozflux towers operated as part of the Professor Clancy's TERN program.
The 33 towers spread across the country take a range of constant readings of the Australian landscape, including humidity, temperatures and carbon dioxide.
These towers helped explain why global carbon dioxide levels stopped rising for one year in 2011 as heavy rainfall across Australia's interior triggered an unusual greening of the outback, said Derek Eamus, a researcher with the University of Technology, Sydney.
"It turned out to be that the arid and semi-arid zones were more responsive than expected," said Dr Eamus, whose work takes in two of the outback towers. "It was a completely new conclusion."
The loss of the Ozflux towers, which have funding only until June 30, would also leave a hole in global coverage with Australia just one part of an international network, researchers said.
With Nicky Phillips
