CSIRO cuts loose

The CSIRO will close two laboratories and merge two divisions, at the cost of about 100 jobs, following funding cuts announced in last week's federal budget.

CSIRO chief executive Dr Geoff Garrett said 85 full-time equivalent positions, or around 100 staff, would be lost over the next year. The cuts will mainly affect CSIRO's food and agriculture research.

In a statement to staff, Garrett said the organisation will close the Rendel livestock research laboratory in Rockhampton - which the CSIRO website says received a $3 million refit only two years ago - as well as small field station in WA.

Some staff from the Rendel lab will be transferred to Townsville and some to Brisbane.

It will also close a plant research laboratory in Merbein, near Mildura, which has been in operation since 1919. CSIRO's horticultural research will now be centralised in Adelaide with a few staff left to sustain a valuable grape rootstock collection at Merbein.

The Forest Biosciences division will be split up between other divisions and staff redeployed, while the Textiles and Fibre Technology division will merge with the Materials Science and Engineering division.

Activities and accommodation will be "rationalised" at one of its Sydney sites, the organisation said.

CSIRO Staff Association president Dr Michael Borgas criticised the move, saying Australia should be boosting support for the CSIRO, not cutting it.

He also criticised the increasing centralisation of CSIRO away from regional industry.

"We think there is a real case for CSIRO to go out broadly to industry," he said. "It's ironic that while people within the Government believe we should be engaging more with industry in order to innovate, other bureaucracies are pushing in the opposite direction."

He said CSIRO's leadership team had seriously mismanaged the situation by allowing the budget cuts to affect the scientific work of the agency.

"The current CSIRO leadership has overseen a number of large cost blowouts in major organisational programs in recent years. That's where the cuts should be targeted, not the laboratory."

Garrett said CSIRO had been pressed for the last three years to reduce costs and improve efficiency and was being asked to do so again.

"CSIRO's focus has been on finding ways to reduce fixed costs and overheads wherever possible so that we can minimise the impact these budget reductions will have on CSIRO's science capability and activity," he said.

"However, with funding reductions of this size and in light of the significant reductions that have already been made by CSIRO over the past five years to overhead and support costs, there will be an adverse impact on research."

The Australian Nuclear Science and Technology Organisation (ANSTO) announced on Monday that it too will shed staff following the budget.

Around 80 staff will be lost from its workforce of 1009, some of which are expected to be involuntary redundancies.