Science 'book burning' continues in Australia: Ian Dunlop

(Just two years ago a former international oil, gas and coal industry executive, chair of the Australian Coal Association and chief executive of the Australian Institute of Company Directors who is now a member of the Club of Rome, Ian Dunlop, wrote about the disembowelling of Australia’s science ideals and although we now have a different Prime Minister, the same values still apply and so he continues to be concerned enough to remind people via Twitter of what he said in 2014 and how his concerns have changed little for we continue to plunder our science institutions – Robert McLean)

Ian Dunlop was worried about our "burning of
our science books" in 2014 and two years
later nothing has changed to ease his mind.

Australia has an enviable reputation for Ian Dunlop extending long before the heyday of the CSIRO in the 1950s under the visionary leadership of Sir Robert Menzies and Sir Ian Clunies-Ross. On the hottest and driest continent on Earth, our prosperity would be non-existent had it not been for the enlightened application of science. So it has been of mounting concern over recent years to see governments of all persuasions adopt increasingly anti-science agendas.

The federal government is taking anti-science to new heights. Its scorched earth approach discards virtually everything not in line with narrow, free-market ideology, centred on sustaining Australia’s 20th century dig-it-up and ship-it-out economic growth model. 

Read what Ian Dunlop wrote in The Sydney Morning Herald in 2014 - “Tony Abbott is gutting science just when we need it most.”