The Budget: suddenly it’s the ‘70s

The government looks back in beige, a learned reader laments

The winners are pleased with small wins and the losers lament losses small enough to stay under the radar, for example to National Science and Innovation Agenda programmes.

But what takes us back a generation is the final rejection of Malcolm Turnbull’s innovation agenda.

This is a budget from the past, based on the assumption that our existing economy will generate jobs and fund our future. It is a budget that a prime minister called McMahon instead of Morrison could have overseen.

Certainly, the government is kicking-in cash, as always promised, to the Medical Research Future Fund – this is a matter of basic politics. No government that wants to stay in office dares defy the lab legions.

But the decision that defines the budget is taking the dormant Education Investment Fund and reallocating its $3.9 bn to a natural disaster recovery reserve (it was previously meant to go the NDIS).

This reinforces the MYEFO message of research block-grant cuts. The EIF’s end is designed for back-benchers to sell as common-sense, putting putative practicality over investing in ideas. The decision dates from the 2016 election, when a mass of voters was alarmed by Mr Turnbull’s talk of science transforming the economy, of setting Australia up to compete in the imminent world where AI produces prosperity. People who feared for their grand-children’s jobs were scarred by the then PM and the government does not want to frighten them again.

We are back to an era where the government looks at the economy and tells us, “she’ll be right.”

With the attitude to research in this budget, it won’t.  


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