The announcement struck the university sector like a thunderbolt out of a clear blue sky, hurled not by Zeus, Thor or Tāwhirimātea but by the coalition government’s nearest equivalent, Judith Collins, Science Minister and goddess of storms.
Without warning, she announced that the criteria were changing for grants from the Marsden Fund – the government’s largest, most prestigious research awards, worth $77.7 million this year. Grants would be available to only “core scientific research that helps lift our economic growth and contributes to science with a purpose”. Humanities and social science projects would no longer be eligible.
The reaction was swift and vehement. One academic lamented that the government had “defunded the mind”.
Most of the blame should go to the Royal Society’s funding panels, which eagerly sealed their own doom. When you’re spending $861,000 of the public’s money on research “linking the celestial spheres to end-of-life experiences” and the now-infamous $360,000 study on the Ohakune Carrot bringing “a critical gaze to the privileging of Pākehā-centred narratives”, the election of a right-wing government inevitably becomes an extinction-level event.
Collins’ announcement is also a means to signal the coalition’s alleged seriousness about science. Repeated reports on New Zealand’s economic dysfunction have connected our low productivity to persistent underinvestment in research and development. The Prime Minister’s five-step recipe for economic growth is improved education, better infrastructure, greater connectivity with the global economy, deregulation and more technology research. Collins’ job is to deliver the last – and arguably most important – item on this list.
Science shake-up
She has taken a keen interest in artificial intelligence, and she is also – proudly – our first minister for space. Shortly after the coalition’s formation, she commissioned Sir Peter Gluckman – the inaugural prime ministerial science adviser, a role which currently stands empty – to conduct a review of the sector. The first phase of the report was due in June, the second in October. Both are now expected to be released next year. The radical nature of some of its suggestions have reportedly raised eyebrows around the cabinet table.
One academic lamented that the government had ‘defunded the mind’.
Science and research policy gets investigated every three or four years. The advice is always to increase funding: we’re in the bottom third of the OECD in terms of our spending on the sector as a percentage of GDP. The chronic underinvestment leads to slow adoption of new technologies, less automation across industry; inefficient businesses, companies that are internationally uncompetitive.
Unfortunately, science investment is a long-term prospect. It takes years to develop high-quality research labs and bring new inventions to market. From a political point of view, this is wasted money. It comes out of your budget and some future government gets all the upside. So the preference across successive governments has been to rebrand existing funding. National launched the National Science Challenges; Labour dreamed up a doomed notion of Wellington as a “science city”.
There’s certainly no new money for Collins to invest, but her gaze seems to be drifting across the tracts of the tertiary and research sectors that are not science: studies into celestial spheres and roadside carrots may not be the last areas of scholarship to fall beneath the minister’s dread gaze. But she’ll probably need to restore some social science funding: if the government wants to boost economic growth it will need the odd economist around to tell it if it has succeeded.
Eyes on India
Much of the coalition’s international efforts next year will focus on India and the US. During the election campaign, Christopher Luxon promised a free-trade deal and met PM Narendra Modi during the East Asian summit. He received an invitation to visit next year.
The re-election of Donald Trump has elevated the urgency of this work. China and the US are our largest trading partners. We may face tariffs on our exports to the United States, and the Trump administration’s hawkish stance towards China could destabilise our current delicate balance between the security alliance focused on Australia and America – possibly to be cemented via Pillar 2 of the Aukus pact – and the vital trading relationship with China.
India is the obvious solution to this dilemma. Its economy is booming, and its population size has already overtaken China’s. It doesn’t present the same security tensions. It’s a democracy with an expanding middle class.
Foreign Minister Winston Peters and Trade Minister Todd McClay have scrambled to rebuild the relationship, which languished during the later stages of the Key government and all of the Ardern-Hipkins era: a baffling indifference to one of the world’s most important nations, which is currently only our 12th-largest trading partner – it mostly buys raw logs, wool and kiwifruit.
Luxon is notoriously bad at explaining what his government is doing and why, but success across these areas would be significant.
Australia signed a trade agreement with India in 2022 but it precluded dairy exports ‒ an area of political and economic sensitivity, with significant tariffs protecting India’s large domestic sector.
Luxon seems to think he can do better: there’s a theory floating around Wellington that Fonterra could build partnerships with Indian companies and help them modernise and India’s flourishing tech sector could help revitalise the rest of New Zealand’s economy. Accepting more of their tertiary students could keep our universities afloat.
Both of these projects – investing in science, pivoting the trade relationship – are long-term investments. Luxon is notoriously bad at explaining what his government is doing and why, but success across these policy areas would be significant accomplishments in delivering his mojo-restoring turn-around job promised during last year’s campaign.
There’s nothing magical about investing in technology and diversifying trade: it’s what successful countries do as a matter of routine. But even these basic measures have evaded many of our recent governments. At least some of the current ministers are reaching for the stars.
