The CSIRO is scrambling to deal with funding cuts in the federal budget, and astronomy is in the firing line

Deep cuts to the CSIRO budget will see up to 30 positions go in the organisation’s space research division and the suspension of its Bolton fellowship, one of the world’s most prestigious astronomy scholarships.



The Australis fellowship and a number of postdoctoral positions will also go unfilled, and the organisation will not appoint a chief scientist to head its world-leading Square Kilometre Array project, as the CSIRO scrambles to find savings after a $114m funding cut in the federal budget.

Many of these staff cuts could occur by not filling vacant positions or renewing contracts as their terms end, the chief of the CSIRO’s astronomy and space science division, Lewis Ball, said in a presentation in Sydney on Wednesday, but at least nine redundancy offers would be made this week, with “another few likely” in the next year.

The job losses include at least four at the Parkes observatory, with sources inside the organisation suggesting an electrical engineer, an electrician and two visitor support staff will go.

The Bolton Fellowship was established by CSIRO fellow and astronomer Ron Ekers in 1998, and named after the former “dishmaster” of the Parkes radio telescope, John Bolton. The Australian radio astronomer was part of the team who first identified radio waves from outside the Milky Way in 1948.

Ekers said the scholarship was put in place “to remedy this increasing gap where astronomy departments are not teaching people to build telescopes”.

"If we don't continue to encourage people who understand the technology as well as the astronomy, it's going to be very hard to move forward in the future,” he said. “We need the mechanism to do that.”

The Bolton Fellowship is especially sensitive to budget cuts because it is entirely funded by the CSIRO rather than an external source.

A previous recipient, Dr Ilana Feain, now a senior research fellow at the University of Sydney, said the fellowship had allowed her to “sit on the fence somewhat between engineering and astronomy”.

“As an astronomer, if you understand the engineering, you have more room to do innovative research,” she said.

Feain said the fellowship was “bringing in very good people, we’ve had some excellent international Boltons, and in the astronomy world, it’s recognised all around the world”.

A senior scientist within the CSIRO’s astronomy division, Dr Bärbel Koribalski, said the suspension of the Bolton Fellowship and the looming staff cuts had put “a dampener on our motivation and spirit, and they come as a big surprise overall”.

She said the fact a chief scientist would not be hired to oversee the next-generation Square Kilometre Array, a group of 36 antennas in the West Australian outback linked to a worldwide network working as a single telescope, was a blow to the project.

“We thought it was essential that such a person would be recruited, and initially [CSIRO chief executive] Megan Clark agreed to that, but that was before she had seen the new budget,” she said.

To save money, astronomers will also move towards only using the Narrabri observatory remotely from their home institutions, which Koribalski said would impact on productivity.

“The people [at Narrabri] are experts with the array, with data reduction … talking to the engineers, understanding how a particular problem is being fixed, that kind of knowledge is not imparted in the same way, or not at all, when you’re not on the site,” she said.

A CSIRO spokesman said the agency “hopes to reinstate the Bolton fellowships in the future” and “remains committed to managing its radio astronomy facilities on behalf of the nation”.

The CSIRO staff association said around 700 jobs would go across the organisation in the next four years as a result of budget cuts, amounting to about 20% of the agency’s workforce.

Last month, the cuts were the subject of an unprecedented national day of protest by hundreds of scientists and other staff.