TO:
Christopher Luxon, Prime Minister
Winston Peters, Deputy Prime Minister
David Seymour, Leader, ACT New Zealand
Judith Collins, Minister of Science, Innovation and Technology

CC:
Party Leaders
Media

16 December 2024 

We are scientists who have been recognised with New Zealand's highest honour for early-career achievement, the Prime Minister's MacDiarmid Emerging Scientist Prize. Leaving aside the removal of the Marsden Fund's support for Humanities and Social Sciences research, which has been thoroughly discussed elsewhere, we write to voice our disagreement with the decision to alter the Terms of Reference of the Marsden Fund such that "approximately 50 percent of funds will go towards supporting proposals with economic benefits to New Zealand".  

We believe this decision will have a long-term negative impact on economic growth: A cut to the funding of basic science in New Zealand is a cut to innovation and our global competitiveness in research and development. Since its inception, the $79-million-per-year Marsden Fund has been 100% dedicated to funding open-ended, basic-science projects across all fields, with applications to society, commercialisation, or indeed, the NZ economy that may not be immediately realised. 

Starting in 2025, half of that funding will be diverted to projects with immediate economic applications — despite New Zealand already having substantially more funding available from other, larger pools that are dedicated solely to applied research (e.g., the $300M Strategic Science Investment Fund; the $223M Endeavour Fund). 

This cut will lead to New Zealand losing our best scientists to competing universities and scientific institutions overseas. It will make it difficult to recruit new scientists to our country and make it difficult to attract home New Zealand scientists that have studied and worked abroad. The cuts will reduce our competitiveness in recruiting international students, attracting international and industrial funding, and, above all, being a destination for global scientific talent. These outcomes will reduce our global competitiveness in both the public and private research sectors, which will only have negative impacts on the New Zealand economy. 

Moreover, cutting basic-science funding is a short-sighted strategy, as this type of science is among the safest, highest-return investments a nation can make in research. The outcomes of basic-science projects are impossible to predict at the time projects are funded, because their largest impacts may occur many years after the science is actually done. Consider key advances that we rely on daily, from the practical (wi-fi, microwaves) to the life-saving (gene editing to treat diseases, treatments for cystic fibrosis) to those currently revolutionising our economy (algorithms underlying machine learning and artificial intelligence). All of these resulted from long-term investment in basic science.

Such investments are now slated to be cut by half in New Zealand. We urge the Government to reconsider this decision.

Signatories:

John Watt, 2009 Prime Minister’s MacDiarmid Emerging Scientist

Scientist, Center for Integrated Nanotechnologies, Los Alamos National Laboratory (USA) 

Donna Rose Addis, 2010 Prime Minister's MacDiarmid Emerging Scientist

Canada 150 Research Chair in Cognitive Neuroscience of Memory and Aging, Department of Psychology, University of Toronto and Senior Scientist, Rotman Research Institute (Canada) 

Rob McKay, 2011 Prime Minister's MacDiarmid Emerging Scientist

Professor and Director, Antarctic Research Centre, Victoria University of Wellington 

Karl Iremonger, 2014 Prime Minister's MacDiarmid Emerging Scientist

Associate Professor, Department of Physiology, School of Biomedical Sciences, University of Otago  

Alex Taylor, 2015 Prime Minister's MacDiarmid Emerging Scientist

ICREA Research Professor, Institut de Neurociències, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (Spain)

Carla Meledandri, 2017 Prime Minister’s MacDiarmid Emerging Scientist 

Jemma Geoghegan, 2021 Minister's MacDiarmid Emerging Scientist

Professor and Webster Chair of Viral Pathogenesis, Ōtākou Whakaihu Waka University of Otago 

Jonathan Tonkin, 2022 Prime Minister's MacDiarmid Emerging Scientist

Associate Professor, School of Biological Sciences, University of Canterbury 

Samuel Mehr, 2023 Prime Minister's MacDiarmid Emerging Scientist

Senior Lecturer, School of Psychology, University of Auckland and Associate Professor Adjunct, Child Study Center, Yale University (USA)

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