It's odd that Morrison believes that "public support" should be a determining factor for the expenditure of public money on science but somehow not be on, say, a non-binding $160 million marriage plebiscite, but there are plenty of other reasons to conclude that neither Morrison nor Hadley have any idea what they're talking about. For example: Why are we ruining pubs? I don't know how much time Hadley and Morrison have spent in pubs, but I've been doing assiduous fieldwork for a quarter of a century and I can say with some authority that the Venn diagram of "great ideas for research" and "ideas formed in pubs" shows limited overlap. That's not to say that booze and truth aren't linked - I'm a lifelong adherent of the in vino veritas school of intellectual inquiry - but pubs are undeniably terrible places to try and convince someone that your field of research would be worthy of funding. Especially if the football's on.

That being said, I would definitely encourage studies like "Breaking the Seal: how limited pub seating and $10 jugs determine urinal frequency", "The logarithmic scale of kebab deliciousness by consumer alcohol level" or "She's coming in, 12.30 flight: how the lateness of the hour determines a front bar's subjective opinion of Toto's Africa". Experts are more expert than non-experts This next statement might come as something of a shock given the make up of the current Senate and that a solid 60 per cent of the media is just angry feelpinions, but: people who know stuff are generally more reliable judges of the necessity of things that people who don't know stuff. And people generally realise this in their day-to-day lives, which is why no one comes to me for surgery or to repair their cars - or, at least, rarely more than once. That's because my abilities, such as they are, do not encompass these very specific and technical skills. Science (science!) also requires incredibly specific knowledge, now more so than ever, because we know so very, very much stuff.

Once upon a time questions like "hey, why do all those people get sick after licking graveyard rats?" represented the pinnacle of epidemiology, but these days scientific research requires more than an amateur interest in cemetery rat vomit. This makes justifying research to people who don't necessarily understand the field very challenging. Explaining why, for example, a survey of binary stars in the visible universe is a worthwhile thing to do is going to be complicated if the listener's only knowledge of such systems is from Star Wars, not least since it's going to end in a long argument about whether Tatooine would have had a stable enough atmosphere and geology to allow for the evolution of Jawas, much less how the complex gravitational interaction of two stars orbiting a shared centre of mass would affect ships coming and going from Mos Eisley spaceport. That said: I have complex theories regarding both of those issues. It's a common strawman argument presented by jerks

Despite what Hadders and his ilk seem to think, getting research funding is a complicated and difficult process. Furthermore, the applications for said funding literally require the applicant to justify why the research is useful and worthwhile. So when someone says, for example, "we expect them to take into account public support for these types of activities" then it's actually code for "I have no idea what I'm talking about, but I don't want to annoy the scary radio-man by disagreeing". And this line of anti-intellectual eggheads-in-their-ivory-towers-of-book-learnin' attack is a great favourite of conservative yelling types who, historically, have deliberately misrepresented legitimate, important research as being frivolous nonsense. For example: the last time this flared up was just before the 2013 election when the Tony Abbott-led Coalition promised to curb the "waste" of academic research funding with Abbott's future-treasurer-now-punchline Joe Hockey singling out a study called "The God of Hegel's Post-Kantian Idealism" as being the sort of wasteful frippery his government would abolish. And that title might sound deeply arcane until you read about the study and discover that, among many other things, the research seeks to understand how different interpretations of the concept of God can fuel dangerous religious extremism: an area of knowledge which seemed pretty darn pertinent in 2013, and also right now.