Australia's leading agricultural research organisation has slashed its workforce by nearly a quarter, to the dismay of the farming lobby.
Subscribe now for unlimited access.
$0/
(min cost $0)
or signup to continue reading
The Australian Bureau of Agricultural and Resource Economics and Sciences says it was forced to cull 44 of its 197 public servants as cash-strapped government departments cut their research budgets.
The job losses are on top of the hundreds of redundancies planned at the bureau's parent-department Agriculture.
ABARES, the leading adviser to government and industry on agriculture, fisheries and forestry, made the cuts in response to what it called a "tight budget environment".
The National Farmers Federation said it was concerned about the job losses and called on the Coalition government to ensure that research and development in the primary industries sector was properly funded.
But Agriculture Minister Barnaby Joyce blamed the job losses, and looming redundancies in the Agriculture Department's frontline bio-security border services, on his Labor predecessors.
ABARES gets much of its funding by carrying out research for government agencies and the private sector but, according to a spokesman, the bureau's income had dropped off as departments responded to successive rounds of cuts by slashing their research budgets.
"ABARES faced a budget deficit largely because of a shortfall in cost-recovered revenue, reflecting the tight budget environment across government, and conducted a review of its structure and functions," a spokesman said. "As part of this process, ABARES reduced its head count from 197 to 153 via natural attrition, redeployment and voluntary redundancies while ensuring continued efficiency and maintaining sustainable and manageable workloads."
National Farmers Federation national president Duncan Fraser stressed the importance of ABARES to Australia's agricultural industries. "It (ABARES) is important to agriculture for its surveying and statistical gathering," Mr Fraser said.
"We'd be very concerned if there were major staff reductions out of the core group.
"We need to ensure there's a suitable and adequate retention of people to get that research and development out into the field."
The farmers' leader said his group was also worried by the mass job losses, revealed this week by the Canberra Times, at Agriculture with the bio-security operation the first to feel the pain. "If it's in the quarantine and the bio-security frontline, it's a critical issue for us," Mr Fraser said.
"We promote Australian produce overseas as clean and green and we've seen overseas the effects of sudden outbreaks of animal diseases, plant diseases.
"We've seen markets suddenly shutting down and that's even happened to us with an outbreak of Hendra virus or bird flu or something like that.
"So a concern for us would be that if there was going to be cutbacks to these frontline services, we'd want to see some pretty good justifications from the department."
Mr Joyce said through a spokeswoman that the cuts at ABARES and in the wider Agriculture Department were the fault of the previous Labor government and the efficiency dividends it imposed on the public service.
"Much of ABARES' research is conducted on a cost-recovered basis for government clients and the recent reduction in staffing levels in ABARES has been a result of a longer term downturn in client demand for ABARES services following on from the slow squeeze on the public service from consecutive Labor efficiency dividends," the minister said in a statement.