They only have themselves to blame

There have been howls of outrage from the usual suspects over the decision of the Government to require what used to be NZ’s premier science fund to focus on, ummm, science.

For several years I have highlighted on KB grants which are basically taxpayer funded woke nonsense. The TU has highlighted them. The media (except The Platform) has largely ignored them. No wonder people are surprised – because the media failed to report that there was huge discontent over the Marsden Fund – including from many scientists too scared to speak out.

To refresh memories, here are some of the recent grants:

• Unearthing stories of early Māori ancestry and adaptation in Te Tai Tokerau
• Ngā Kare-a-roto: The Ripples Within – Māori Understandings and Expressions of Emotions
• It takes a village: Picturing family support for transgender young people in Aotearoa
• Manahau: In search of the original Māori firm and its philosophy of management
• Rangatiratanga and online media: understanding how Māori, create, shape, experience and share our worlds
• It binds us together”: Netball’s enduring role in the intergenerational health and wellbeing of Aotearoa women
• Taniwha: A Cultural History
• Empowering Indigenous knowledge: Decolonisation and Indigenisation of Gallery, Library, Archival, Museum and Records (GLAMR) institutions.
• Networks of power: Gender, race and class in workplace violence
• Dark nudges and sludge: big alcohol and dark advertising on social media
• Misogyny, rhetorical violence and the invisibilised entwining of digital and embodied social worlds
• Kua kī taku puku, ko te waha o raro kei te hiakai tonu: The de-sexualisation of te reo Māori domains
• Kua whetūrangihia koe. Linking the celestial spheres to end-of-life experiences.
• What Roles and Responsibilities for Aotearoa’s Non-Lawyer Advocates
• He Rau Ringa: Engaging ethnic communities in a Tiriti o Waitangi-centred framework of sustainable citizenship 
• Embracing Islam: Conversion, Identity, and Belonging in Aotearoa New Zealand
• Inclusion through difference: Towards a new ethics of engagement with Takatāpui/LGBTIQ+ parents and their families/whānau
• Prisons without Walls: from Incarceration to E-carceration in Aotearoa New Zealand
• Imagining honourable kāwanatanga: preparing for a Tiriti-based future
• Centring Pacific girl gamers’ voices in understanding how gaming contributes to their wellbeing, identity and relationships
• Me aro ki te hā o Hineahuone: the significant contribution of wāhine from Te Tai Tokerau
• Mā te tāke tika, e mau roa te iwi: with a just tax system, the people are sustained. Researching a Te Tiriti-affirming tax system design
• What are the implications of policing climate justice activism?

Now as I understand it, there is no reduction in funding for the overall Marsden Fund. They have just decided to only fund actual science (physics, chemistry, maths, engineering and biomedical) through the fund. So most or all of the above would no longer be funded by the Marsden Fund, but instead there would be more money for these sort of research projects:

• Controlled liquid metal morphologies combining Chladni patterning and frequency regulated printed substrates
• Understanding how lytic enzymes could allow drugs to breach membranes in  bacteria causing illnesses such as salmonella, and pneumonia
• Looking for new pathways in sustainable energy by investigating reactions of glucose under electrocatalytic reduction
• Investigating the threat from earthquakes in subduction zones that also rupture the overlying crust
• Why are tuatara the only known reptile not prone to Salmonella?
• Assessing insect species’ declines and shifts in foraging breadth to understand changes in plant-pollinator networks.
• Elucidating why pyroclastic gas and ash flows cause so many volcanic fatalities
• New ways of extracting and exploiting information from partial differential equations to solve pivotal problems in geometric analysis, representation theory, and fundamental physics
• Understanding how central nervous system clearance could be targeted to intervene in aging brains and those with traumatic brain injuries
• Unleashing the potential of titanium as a replacement for precious metal catalysts by affixing it to solid supports
• Understanding how temperature affects the circadian clock in legumes
• Analysing whether a newly discovered complement evasion factor is useful in developing a vaccine against Group A Streptococcus
• Analysing gastric bioelectrical patterns to develop non-invasive methods for identifying diagnostic biomarkers
• Better ways to accurately model ice thickness and basal sliding in glaciers and ice sheets

So the Government has decided to use the money from the first list to fund more of the second list. Absolutely brilliant. A win for taxpayers, a win for science, a win for New Zealand.

Now this isn’t to say that non-science research won’t be funded. It will, just not from the Marsden Fund. We still have the following:

• Most years there are 10,000 students (with significant taxpayer funding) doing PhDs, which should involve original research.
• There are 31,000 academic staff in NZ universities who are taxpayer funded, and expected to do research as part of their jobs (and they get every seventh years off to just do research)
• Taxpayers additionally fund $315 million of research every year through the PBRF
• MBIE lists 19 other funds available for research
• MSD has funding available for social science research
• Health Research Council has funding available for health research

So there is still a huge amount of funding available for social science and humanities research.

Dame Anne Salmond has been one of many lamenting this great change. She asks:

If Science Minister Judith Collins was concerned about the pertinence of some Marsden Fund grants in the social sciences and the humanities, the sensible thing would have been to ask the Royal Society of NZ (that administers the Fund) to tighten the criteria.

That was an optionI imagine, but to go down that path would require confidence in the Royal Society to be able to make better decisions. This is the same Society that tried to discipne some of its fellows for writing a letter to The Listener defending science. It is well known that the Society has gone ultra-woke, and frankly they are lucky (in my opinion) that the Government has even left the Marsden Fund with them. If I was the decision maker, I’d hand it all over to another body.

It should have been no secret to the Royal Society that there was considerable disquiet over their recent grants. Did they pick up the message of the election result and the new Government, and make better funding decisions in 2024? Nope, they actually just increased even more their funding of woke research, against hard science. So it is no surprise the Government acted to reduce the discretion the Royal Society has by abolishing the non-science categories.

Abolishing the social science and humanities panels and removing their funding is an over-reaction. It seems to have been a knee jerk response to an on-line campaign by a few bloggers about the Royal Society and the Marsden Fund.

Kind of Dame Anne to credit a few bloggers, but it isn’t about the medium. We were the only ones brave enough to speak up, and point out how ridiculous some of the grants were. Many many New Zealanders would be in agreement, including many scientists. In fact the vast majority of my correspondence about the Royal Society and the Marsden Fund comes from scientists.

I have no inside knowledge on this, but I suspect all that was needed to convince Cabinet to make changes, was to send them a list of the recent grants. I’d be surprised if a single Minister could read through some of the tripe that got funded, and think that the responsible thing to do was to do nothing.