22-05-2025
Gene tech the winner in new science budget
Half of the savings found by cancelling research funds and institutes will be spent setting up an office to attract foreign science and an office to oversee a deregulated gene tech space.
In total, $212 million was cut from the science sector in Budget 2025, of which $107m was spent setting up the office of the Gene Technology Regulator and Invest New Zealand.
With the Gene Technology Bill before select committee, there has been criticism about its ability to open up New Zealand as a proving ground for foreign gene-tech companies to test their products.
The total budget line for business, science and innovation was $813m. But nearly three quarters of this, $576m, was a rebate for international moviemakers. This left $236 million for science and innovation.
Some $212m of that was funded by cannibalising other areas of the science sector.
The two main spends funded by cuts to research and innovation were the combination of an international investment agency alongside a gene technology regulator tasked with obeying 'general policy directions' of a given government.
These were Invest New Zealand and the Gene Technology Regulator.
Invest New Zealand had 84.6m earmarked over four years. The new agency was tasked with attracting foreign capital to New Zealand, with an emphasis on scientific ventures.
Meanwhile, $22.8m was dedicated over the same four years to the Gene Technology Regulator. The regulator was tasked with overseeing the country's new GMO regime, defined by the Gene Technology Bill, which is due to pass into law by the end of the year. This funding also supported compliance and monitoring of the new regime.
The gene tech bill will deregulate many gene technologies, opening the door for innovation. Support has come largely from the agriculture sector.
Scion's Alec Foster told Newsroom last week that research into conifers alone could unlock billions in the New Zealand economy, and he believed the industry was capable and best-suited to regulate the technology's use.
Select committee hearings are underway for the bill, but criticisms of the new regime have focused on the degree of deregulation proposed and the relative lack of independence wielded by the new regulator.
As Newsroom has previously reported, Fonterra warned in its submission that pitfalls could 'cede control' to foreign nations via legislative design.
The regulator is tied to the directives of the government of the day, unlike Australia's regime on which the bill was based. Other specifics in the bill directly cite Australian legislation, which raised the concern of officials in their regulatory impact statement.
Others have warned about foreign gene-tech companies coming to New Zealand, attracted by lax restrictions, to set up testing facilities for experimental crops.
If those crops were to fall within certain thresholds, they may escape a degree of the regulator's scrutiny, which will already be bound to the 'growth-first' directive of the coalition Government.
This regulator will sit within the Environmental Protection Authority, which has also been tasked with managing fast-track applications.
In his announcement, Minister for Science, Innovation and Technology Shane Reti said: 'We must have an eye on emerging opportunities to make sure we keep growing the role of science and innovation – we must always be asking, what's next?'
The answer wasn't research funding. The majority of new science spends – outside of the film rebate – were funded by the cancellation of funds, grants and centres, but no new ones were created.
The sector as a whole saw very little new funding, which contradicted advice given by Sir Peter Gluckman in the Science System Advisory Group report published in 2024.
Gluckman wrote: 'We have an underfunded system by any international comparison.' This made for competitive inter-agency relationships, which was 'known to inhibit the most intellectually innovative ideas coming forward, and of course it is these that can drive a productive innovation economy'.
Despite new dedicated funds, elsewhere in the Budget a $398m spend on tertiary education boosts looked to emphasise Stem courses.
Some $213m of that fund – from the tertiary education budget line, not science and innovation – would go to 'many' subject areas across the tertiary sector, for a 3 percent increase across whatever that range may be.
Stem subjects in particular were earmarked for a further 1.7 percent increase of $64m. But this was the only extra money given to early-career researchers.
$35.5 million from other funds for this type of work – the Marsden, Health Research, Partnered Research, and Strategic Science Investment funds – was reprioritised. The Innovation Trailblazer and the New to R&D grants were axed, as well as Callaghan Innovation.
The disestablishment of Callaghan Innovation itself was set to cost $38m over four years.
An earlier version of this story said the Marsden Fund and others had been disestablished. The story has been updated to clarify the funds had been partially reprioritised.
