> The Marsden Fund was set up explicitly to support pure, “blue-sky” research, and its current modest budget could only support about 10% of the applications submitted. New Zealand’s science sector already has several other and much larger funding sources for applied research, including the NZ$359 million Strategic Science Investment Fund and NZ$247 million Endeavour Fund. But the Marsden Fund supports nearly all the country’s research in social science.
Tough situation. Their response doesn't sound crazy to me. You have to cut something if you don't have enough money, and if I had to choose what to prioritize, I guess it would be core science research too.
But, how did they let the budget shortfall get so large? Did this catch them by surprise or something? I'd expect this to have been a slow ramping down of new grants and renewals over years rather than a one time catastrophe.
My post-graduate degree and currently only publication is in a social science area. I'm sympathetic to that kind of research in some ways, but pretty cynical about it in other ways. Shrinking the pool of social science researchers down to a much smaller and more competitive group does not even sound like a bad idea in feast times, let alone in famine.
This government arrived on a promise of “fixing” our financial problems. A lot of these shortfalls have been artificially created; as an example, our healthcare sector went from breaking even to being “hundreds of millions” in deficit after the budget was massaged. That created the “crisis” that let them fire the board in charge and appoint a commissioner who has been aggressively slashing public services in order to meet the new budget. The reduction in service is driving growth in the private insurance sector.
Science is in a similar position. The shortfalls they’re talking about now are shortfalls they created last year and left to rot so they could have a crisis now.
> A lot of these shortfalls have been artificially created
Can you point to a link showing this?
Officially:
Our revised budget for 2024/25 is a $1.1 billion deficit. This is significantly lower than the $1.76 billion deficit we were heading towards without our cost reduction programme,” Ms Apa says
I’m on my phone right now and getting search engines to limit their time frame in a mobile UI is tiresome, so I’ll do that when I’m back at a computer :) (but the core thing to do is compare projected budget under the previous govt and actual budget under this govt). Both of those numbers above are post-new budget. The budgeted “increase” in healthcare was less than the increases in population and inflation. It gets worse when we add in the fact that NZ has an aging population with requisite cost increases.
This govt gave us tax cuts and restored billions of dollars in tax rebate for landlords which decreased the spending pool available for things like healthcare.
In no way is this an issue of not having enough money. The Marsden fund is only 75 million NZ ($43m USD) and it was already heavily slanted towards projects which could show economic benefits. This is an ideologically driven purge
Tough situation. Their response doesn't sound crazy to me. You have to cut something if you don't have enough money, and if I had to choose what to prioritize, I guess it would be core science research too.
But, how did they let the budget shortfall get so large? Did this catch them by surprise or something? I'd expect this to have been a slow ramping down of new grants and renewals over years rather than a one time catastrophe.
My post-graduate degree and currently only publication is in a social science area. I'm sympathetic to that kind of research in some ways, but pretty cynical about it in other ways. Shrinking the pool of social science researchers down to a much smaller and more competitive group does not even sound like a bad idea in feast times, let alone in famine.