CSIRO looking for growth in funding

CSIRO chief executive Dr Geoff Garrett will have more riding on the May 13 Federal budget than most Australians. Halfway through his five-year appointment, he will be wanting to show his staff that they can look forward to real growth in public funding in the years ahead. If not, their disgruntlement over his challenging leadership may render the second half of his tenure more challenged than the first.

A May 2002 survey of CSIRO staff provided a window into their state of mind. While 84 per cent were positive about their working environment and job satisfaction, and 75 per cent were positive about CSIRO's reputation, only 45 per cent were favourably disposed to the rate and direction of organisational change and 47 per cent were positive about the organisation's leadership and direction.

Angst over its desire for increased funding is a perennial CSIRO issue, as are the needs to increase its revenue from the private sector, reform its administrative structure, and improve its communication to the public and stakeholder groups in particular. None of this is new under Garrett, but he has pushed a change agenda on all those fronts harder and faster than his predecessors. In the process he has identified himself closer to the government and further from CSIRO than his predecessors, which is why he needs a good result on budget night.

But after making the strategic decision to postpone its bid for its next triennial funding period until after the government announced its national research priorities late last year, CSIRO now finds itself looking for more money from a public purse under pressure from a slowing economy and the cost of war.

"I understand CSIRO's needs and it's one of the priorities for the portfolio," the minister for Education, Science and Training, Dr Brendan Nelson, said in March, adding a cautionary rider.

"Everything in the budgetary sense is considered in the context of having come off a cash deficit last year into a forecast surplus this year, the drought and a 0.7 per cent contraction in GDP, weak global and US economy, and costs of the Iraq war and anti-terror measures."

CSIRO's net appropriation for the current financial year is $AUD639 million, about $30 million more than the year before. While that may creep up over the next three years, Garrett has stated a grand ambition to increase CSIRO's total income to $1.3 billion. While the bulk of this growth would have to come from external sources, Garrett was unable to provide details when asked for a breakdown at Senate Estimates Committee hearings in February.

"That $1.3 billion, five to six years out, had to be loose," Garrett said. "It was a challenging star in the sky and it enabled us to put in place a whole series of planning protocols to say, 'How are we going to do this with the goal not of revenue but of increasing our impact for the benefit of Australia?'".

The question was placed on notice, along with several others, for a formal response to the committee by March 19. It is understood that CSIRO failed to meet that deadline.

It is this kind of performance -- visionary, energetic, ambitious but ultimately lacking in substance -- that has caused diminishing respect for Garrett's leadership from scientifically-minded CSIRO staffers. If the budget outcome is better than they expect, it will give him a platform from which he could begin to turn this perception around.

External funding targets

More difficult will be meeting his targets for increased external funding. Last year he told a National Press Club audience that he wanted CSIRO's income from licensing of its intellectual property to increase by 1000 per cent by 2006. He has invested boldly to bring this about, appointing a former venture capitalist, Mehrdad Baghai, as executive director of business development and commercialisation. Baghai directs a total of 59 staff, including 19 newly created full-time positions and two part-time positions.

"The budget has increased as part of my coming to the organisation and the efforts I am putting into place by about $4.5 million," Baghai told the estimates hearing.

At the same time, all CSIRO divisions have been asked to plan for "reallocations" of zero, 5 per cent or 10 per cent of their operating budgets to fund seven "flagship" research programs that will draw on the work of several divisions. Three of these -- Light Metals, Healthy Country, and Preventative Health -- are already established and the plans are for the full fleet to absorb a major proportion of CSIRO's resources.

"Over the course of the next triennium and by 2005-06, we will be moving to a total funding in these focused domains of between 30 and 40 per cent of our appropriation funding," Garrett told the hearing.

The flagship projects will be managed by new positions called group chairs which will be responsible for several CSIRO divisions. This appears similar to a former structure in which divisions were overseen by institute directors, showing that whatever managerial theory is imposed on CSIRO the functional outcomes end up much the same.

By the end of Garrett's tenure he will be hoping to have long since justified his investment in the commercialisation unit by being able to show CSIRO's external funding trending upwards at a double digit rate.

To do so he needs to imbue his staff with the enthusiasm he exudes for his vision for CSIRO's future. Otherwise they will just sit tight and wait for him to disappear. He may know that winning his own staff over is perhaps the toughest part of his job, but at the estimates hearing he rejected a suggestion from Labor's science spokesman, Senator Kim Carr, that half the organisation had no faith in his leadership.

"Across half of the overall 22 indicators, there is a very significant positive movement in how people are feeling about the organisation," Garrett said. "We recognised that we were starting from a low base because change is uncomfortable... We believe we are making progress."

If the organisation takes another staff survey in May this year, Garrett will be hoping it shows signs of that progress. Ideally it will come after May 13, with the respondents basking in the glow of a generous increase in CSIRO's appropriation funding.

Simon Grose is a freelance Canberra correspondent