All too true, Julian, especially the last bit –

< Above all it could better inform the national debate about the pathways to a stronger, brighter and more sustainable future… >

Our future is being very seriously compromised by the business sector and pro-growth lobby having the ear of government far and away more so than those who see great danger in continuous growth and pandering to the short-term wishes of the powerful vested-interest sectors.

There are hundreds of scientists and academics around the country who are greatly concerned about the direction our government is taking us, but who feel that they can’t speak out, largely because they and their institutions are government-funded.

There is an enormous bias here, there is a huge corruption of free speech and there is a very strong antidemocratic element to it all.

We DESPERATELY need something like a National Research Council, or some mechanism whereby scientists can speak out in the interests of healthy debate about our national future, without feeling as though they might lose their jobs or suffer declining finding for their institute as a result .

Good article.

Science may be objective but the funding of it, and the purposes for which it is used, can never be objective or scientific, because they intrinsically require value judgments based on human interests. Thus it is a complete fallacy to argue that government-funded science represents, or can ever represent, some kind of objective independent voice or knowledge base for the greater good, as if scientists had no personal interests, or social bias, or political agenda of their own.

As the author shows, virtually the entire industry of science is government-funded. And he assumes that, without government funding, most of it would not be funded.

So it is complete nonsense to say science is a “victim” or that it’s being “strangled”. That’s like saying a baker is the “victim” of his customers who are “strangling” him if they don’t give him the money to supply goods which they don’t want to buy, but that he nevertheless wants to supply!

Far from being victims, government-funded scientists, like government-funded artists, are overwhelmingly the beneficiaries of a privilege to live at others’ expense on incomes *above* what they would be able to earn if constrained to voluntary funding arrangements.

Furthermore, far from providing an interest bloc that provides helpful and disinterested knowledge, an industry of government-funded science bureaucrats will become one of the worst vectors of waste, privilege and *superstition*. This is because they will have an entrenched interest in calling for the never-ending expansion of the technocratic central planning of society, even though it has repeatedly been *scientifically* disproved and never refuted.

Freed from the need to obtain its funding by voluntary means, science can only hitch its wagon to the star of political favouritism, which intrinsically involves the never-ending predations of the political class on the productive class. We should expect, and we will get, from government funding of science the rise of the new dark ages of anti-production, anti-consumption, anti-human sentiments that are rife in the government-funded communites of ecologists and climatologists, with their credo of irrational *unscientific* state-worship.

Far from being entrenched, the state funding of science should be abolished.

Oh Dear. Could you imagine if someone had to change there life-stiles and get their hands dirty in order to help the planet to recover....Oh my! I can see them choking over there caviar right now:) and whats that O2 stuff? I heard from the idiot-box, we will be fine on all fronts, without changing a thing.

Oh Dear:)

LEAP

The plain English movement arose when Scientists realised they needed to speak clearly with the bulk of the population. Publications are the determinants of one’s career, the majority of papers published are lucky to be read by more than half a dozen people. Time and again the content of papers can be halved with reader comprehension improved.

What is also notable about many scientists is the narrow focus they hold and the degree of arrogance in terms of what they know. Nothing works in isolation and wisdom is something more than science produces.

It is time for scientists/academics to communicate clearly with the general population. At the moment they spend their time talking to each other; and more often than not with little respect.

Whilst scientists/academics fail to communicate to the general population Australia is fundamentally a society based on individuals maximising their personal benefit not considering others. In this context appeals to a greater good is no longer relevant.

<< Far from being entrenched, the state funding of science should be abolished. >>

Not sure about that, Peter Hume.

How would you fund science?

There are big problems with it being funded by private enterprise.

And there are problems with science having to generate its own funding by way of commercial enterprise.

So how could it be done with true independence from government, or from the vest interests of its funders in general?

<< We should expect, and we will get, from government funding of science the rise of the new dark ages of anti-production, anti-consumption, anti-human sentiments that are rife in the government-funded communites of ecologists and climatologists, with their credo of irrational *unscientific* state-worship. >>

What? Just the opposite would be true, wouldn’t it? With the current government, and big business, funding of science, we’d (continue to) get maximised production, with minimised regard for ecological limitations, until we produce and consume ourselves into oblivion!

What we desperately need is a scientific fraternity that has a whole lot more power to express concerns about our grossly unsustainable momentum, and to work out how we can get off of the future-destroying continuous growth spiral of ever-more production and consumption by ever-more people until we are forced to stop doing it in some drastic way by ecological limits.

I am genuinely sorry to have to declare that I can’t agree with Julian, or Ludwig, in the proposed answer to what is an undeniable deterioration of Science’s status in public affairs.

Starting with the Regan years in the USA, there has built up an amorphous well-funded, and unfortunately well-connected, movement dedicated to deny, delay, and obfuscate. A movement determined to direct scientists, whose work has produced data contrary to preferred outcomes, to “go back and re-do it until you get it right according to our beliefs”.

Further to Julian’s examples, the push to denigrate the status of science is evidenced in the December 2010 (its final issue) of People and Place: in the editorial, and also in the article by Barney Foran.
Whether it comes from Universities, CSIRO, Academies of Science, - wherever it is, the science will be declared defective, wrong, or doctored, if the data published from that source does not accord with outcomes pre-determined by those within the fold of deny-delay-obfuscate.

It will take a supremely well-organised and well-funded bureaucracy running an Independent Research Council, as well as rights to publish, to enable the science community to engage competitively with those fogging the issues.