This week, Pyne starts his campaign again. But not with further blandishments or offers to treat. He is now using threats and blackmail. If the Coalition cannot get its deregulation package through the Senate, he warns, he will cancel scientific research funding by dropping the $150 million National Collaborative Research Infrastructure Scheme. That could take out 1700 jobs – all scientists no doubt intended by Pyne to lobby parliamentarians to pay the ransom so that they can continue their research, and keep their jobs.

Prime Minister Tony Abbott and other members of the cabinet, including its Expenditure Review Committee, have not entirely openly adopted the Pyne strategy or tactic, but have hardly disowned him either. The Treasurer, Joe Hockey, made a woolly, but deeply unconvincing ad hoc suggestion that deregulated universities might be able to pick up the slack of any dropped research. The "hostage-taking" is possibly a new low in Australian transactional politicking. It is also a signal political tantrum. It's all the more silly and irresponsible when one considers that NCRIS was devised by the Howard government, and that until recently Pyne was proclaiming himself its saviour because (he said) Labor might have let expire. Moreover, Hockey had made the promotion of research and development a centrepiece of his intergenerational report. It is also noteworthy that neither the cause of university deregulation (or of raised HECS fees for university students), nor cuts to research are "mandate" items put by Abbott to voters before the last election.

It is perfectly true that the government, and the education sector of the budget, is under financial pressure, not least because of its failure to get support for its measures in the Senate. But one might think that a government able, for sheerly ideological purposes, to find money for a $250 million chaplaincy scheme, or hundreds of millions to commemorate a war 100 years ago, might have the fat, and the flexibility, to fund important scientific and industrial research. It is not an indulgence but part of a program to advance knowledge, improving the lives of Australians, and perhaps help transform the economy and the national culture.

But the Pyne gambit is silly as much as it is infamous because it is simply unlikely to work. It can only further reduce his standing as a minister, and reduce confidence in the government, not openly in the electorate but among important interests and lobbies, including the science and university sector itself and a business establishment which has been loud in its support of research. It seems pretty clear that all of the senators whom Pyne was hoping to entice to his side are deeply unimpressed, even disgusted. That they are now more likely, as a consequence, With the Coalition needing six of the eight non-mainstream senators (each, now, formally independent of each other) it appears that even a single defection could not get Pyne over the line.

The government will be put to its bluff,. There would be heavy political fallout if more scientists and researchers, many of whom work inside government bodies such as CSIRO, and the biological and geological science laboratories, are to be sacked. The outcry would not be only in research establishments, but from mining, manufacturing, agricultural and other areas who depend on the research and will be alarmed, and amazed, at government disinvestment, from mere spite.

Given the track record of the Prime Minister in withdrawing "tough" decisions once it is clear the hurdles they face, one can expect the threat to be dropped. All that will happen will be that Pyne, the Prime Minister, and the government generally, will have added to their rich store of enemies, without even the dubious benefit of an accounting "result". They should stop before they do even more damage to themselves, or any notion of orderly and businesslike government.