New Zealand’s science infrastructure is in for a major shake-up, with key research institutes reorganized and a greater focus on commercialization. Some researchers are cautiously positive about the plan, announced last week. But others worry it won’t solve an ongoing science funding crisis, will spur additional job losses in the research sector, and will create unreasonable expectations for fast economic returns.
“These proposed reforms are akin to trying to make more lemonade by squeezing used lemons slightly harder, rather than investing in more lemons,” says Kyle Higham, a fellow at Motu Economic and Public Policy Research.
The reforms are part of a package of measures that aim to “supercharge economic growth,” Prime Minister Christopher Luxon said in announcing them. The biggest change is a revamp of the country’s seven Crown Research Institutes, major national funding bodies that employ roughly half of New Zealand’s scientists. The institutes are owned and partly funded by the government but work closely with the private sector. Starting later this year, the institutes will be reorganized into three new “public research organizations” that will focus on earth sciences, the “bioeconomy,” and health and forensic sciences. A fourth new entity will concentrate on technologies such as artificial intelligence, quantum computing, and synthetic biology. The new organizations will seek investments from the private sector, and the government will also establish a new agency, Invest New Zealand, to encourage more direct foreign investment. In addition, a new national policy for managing intellectual property, to be developed later this year, will give researchers “a greater stake in their research so they can own or profit off what they create,” according to government documents.
The changes mark the largest reset of New Zealand’s research establishment in 30 years, said Judith Collins, who until last week was the nation’s science, innovation, and technology minister. The government hopes they will help the country double exports by 2034 and “maximize the value of the NZ$1.2 billion of taxpayer money that we already put into the science sector each year.”
The government’s plan was unveiled simultaneously with a report from an advisory group appointed in April 2024 to investigate revamping the science sector. The government’s plan reflects some of the report’s recommendations. But some observers note the government appears to have downplayed the report’s warning against counting on a big or immediate payoff. “A naïve idea persists in the New Zealand ecosystem that exploitation of intellectual property is how public research organizations and universities could generate significant income,” the report states. “This is just not the case globally.”
Commercialization of science “takes decades and sustained support,” Higham says. Yet the plan calls for no new government funding in the short term, according to the New Zealand Association of Scientists (NZAS), which generally views the Crown Research Institute mergers as a useful efficiency measure. “Any new money would be unlikely before the 2026 budget,” says NZAS Co-President Lucy Stewart.
In discussing the government’s plans, Luxon referred to Ireland, Denmark, and Singapore as models for how New Zealand could attract more international technology companies and investors. But Higham notes that New Zealand’s public spending on science is, as a percentage of gross domestic product, about half of Denmark’s. “Chronic underinvestment is a key bottleneck that the proposed changes fail to address,” he says.
The reforms will make additional job losses in New Zealand’s already beleaguered science sector inevitable, says NZAS Co-President Troy Baisden. Several Crown Research Institutes laid off hundreds of staff last year as part of the government’s cost-cutting measures, and the plan calls for shutting down Callaghan Innovation, a crown entity set up to improve the commercialization process and act as an innovation incubator. Some of its almost 400 staff may be transferred to the new entities, but the fate of others is uncertain.
Researchers note the government’s plan also ignores other recommendations made by the advisory group. For example, the group called for sustaining support for social sciences, which the government cut recently, and research led by New Zealand’s Indigenous Māori people. But “mātauranga Māori [Indigenous knowledge], like social research, is given little visible space in the reimagination of the science system,” says Amanda Black, director of Bioprotection Aotearoa at Lincoln University, who has tribal affiliations with Tūhoe, Whakatōhea, and Te Whānau a Apanui. “The system continues to exclude many parts of society that contribute to knowledge acquisition.”
Meanwhile, many scientists are leaving the country. Laura Wallace, who studies earthquake risk along New Zealand’s tectonic plate boundary and worked at one of the Crown Research Institutes now set to be merged, moved to a German university because of New Zealand’s shrinking investment in fundamental science, she says. She welcomes the merger plan, but warns that researchers have to be involved in the process to ensure a successful consolidation. “This simply cannot be a top-down process.”
Many scientists are pleased with another significant change announced along with the reform plan: an end to what Collins has called an “utterly ridiculous” 30-year ban on many kinds of genetic engineering research. Currently, for example, researchers can’t conduct field trials with genetically modified organisms in New Zealand. But the government has introduced legislation, now undergoing a 6-month consultation process, that would lift that ban.
Collins, however, will not be overseeing the changes. Last week, in a reshuffle of his cabinet, Luxon named Collins his minister for public service and appointed Shane Reti, his former health minister, to the science post. Reti will handle the implementation of the new science reforms and will oversee the university sector, which employs about half of New Zealand’s scientists and is also currently under review.
