The Post: Reckless approach to research will ensure our slow decline continues

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Productivity, as the economist Paul Krugman once said, isn’t everything – but in the long run, it is almost everything. Producing more for each hour worked increases prosperity, allows people to spend more time with their families and communities while maintaining their standard of living, and can lay the foundations for a less environmentally damaging economy.

Virtually everyone agrees that increased spending on research and development – the creation of new knowledge, products and services – is vital for that enhanced productivity. It is alarming, then, that the last prime minister to take this subject seriously was Helen Clark.

In the 2000s, she lifted the government’s funding for R&D from around 0.3% of GDP to 0.4%, an increase worth hundreds of millions of dollars. It hit nearly 0.5% a few years later but has fallen steadily since, slumping back to 0.3% two years ago.

These data come from a presentation earlier this week by Victoria University emeritus professor Jonathan Boston. Other reports produce slightly higher figures, but either way we are woefully behind the average OECD government, which spends around 0.7% of GDP on research and development.

One might think that our current ministers, who talk incessantly about economic growth, would want to dial up that spending. Not so.

Boston estimates that, on the current trajectory, state funding for R&D will fall by around 10% over four years, after adjusting for inflation. Future Budgets might alter this path: but given the current obsession with cutting spending, who would bet on that?

The previous Labour government had a target for increasing New Zealand’s total spending on R&D – including not just state funds but also business investment – to 2% of GDP. But Shane Reti, while he was still science minister, abandoned that target, dismissing it as “a slogan”.

The result is that our total investment languishes at around 1.5% of GDP, when other small economies – think Denmark, or Singapore – spend literally twice as much. To catch up with them, and become the modern, dynamic, innovative nation we always say we are, we would need to invest – across government agencies and businesses – another $6 billion a year.

And it’s not just economy-focused research that’s being downgraded. This week three senior climate scientists warned that, even as the damage from climate-change-induced floods was ramping up, funding to better predict such disasters was winding down.

Researchers need to examine the compounding risks from a warming atmosphere, rising sea levels, melting snow-packs and extreme rainfall events. But funding for that kind of inquiry has been axed, with no obvious replacement.

Last year, the Government’s budget cuts forced the removal of Earth Sciences New Zealand’s specialist climate modellers, a team of people who established how global trends would play out here. The obvious risk is that we end up flying blind into a world of growing disasters.

Dr Lucy Stewart, who heads the association representing Kiwi researchers, estimates we’ve lost a staggering 700 scientists in the last couple of years. Andrea Bubendorfer, a former Callaghan Innovation staffer, has even claimed to have seen ex-scientists suicidal and financially destitute, their jobs disappearing with nothing to replace them.

Others have gone overseas, in many cases never to return – because what would they return to? They know this Government doesn’t truly value research, and that it’s far from certain its successors will shift the dial.

Continuing its attacks on science, the Government has barred humanities scholars from applying to the $78 million Marsden Fund, the resources of which were vital to social science research in this country. Marsden-backed projects had examined crucial questions like why young people don’t vote, how to better understand men’s mental health, and which reforms could improve sexual consent.

The fund had also supported research into ethical approaches to AI – the kind of inquiry that, as technology increasingly dominates our lives, will only become more important. Even people like the New Zealand Initiative’s Michael Johnston, who thinks the Marsden Fund backed some “silly” projects, believe the solution was greater scrutiny – not a wholesale attack on the social sciences.

The Government’s intellectual vandalism is, in short, cutting investment in research that could support the economy, help us understand looming disasters, and build a better society. Too many ministers, it seems, don’t believe in science (certainly not when it’s inconvenient to their agenda), or are ideologically biased against state investment.

Too many New Zealanders, meanwhile, remain stuck in the old “No.8 wire” mentality, believing – and praying – that innovation will arise from lone individuals pottering in sheds, when increasingly it comes from state-supported industry clusters and large-scale centres of excellence.

The Government will, accordingly, suffer little political damage from its reckless cuts. And as scientists disappear overseas, natural disasters compound in unexpected ways, and our standard of living continue to slump, Kiwis will be left sensing vaguely that something is wrong, without ever really understanding why.