The Australian Antarctic Division did not have internal budgets and overspent $42m in one year before being forced to cancel or defer dozens of crucial climate science projects, including studies of record-low sea ice.
The Greens have described the division’s admission as “shocking” during a Senate inquiry, triggered in part by Guardian Australia’s reports that budget pressure has stopped remediation work and research on melting glaciers, biodiversity and climate change.
Several scientists told the inquiry they were frustrated their research had been repeatedly deferred. One spoke of “physical pain” when learning thousands of penguin chicks had died due to melting sea ice, as her project monitoring the birds had been routinely deferred.
The division must find $25m in savings – which represents about 16% of its operating budget – after a temporary funding boost expired and the Albanese government imposed an efficiency dividend. The government has denied this is a funding cut, despite less money being available compared to last year.
The division has blamed the budget crunch on its own “extraordinary overspend” of $42m last financial year. The division’s deputy secretary, Sean Sullivan, said the division had “no clear budgets at a branch level” last year and lacked transparency about how money was spent.
“There were no clear checks and balances from a governance perspective,” Sullivan said. “We made a decision [last financial year] to only to budget at the divisional level, not at the individual branch level.
“This is basically departmental business. Making sure that [we are] living within our means, at a divisional level, and then making sure that branch heads and the senior executive service actually know what their budget is going forward.”
The Greens senator Peter Whish-Wilson, who called for the inquiry alongside the Liberal senator Jonathon Duniam, said the division’s admissions were “shocking” and led to crucial science work being stopped.
“We knew going into this inquiry that certain matters relating to the AAD’s governance were dysfunctional, but I never could have imagined just how toxic the situation had become – especially for our nation’s Antarctic scientists,” Whish-Wilson said.
“The AAD self-identified a shocking $42 million overspend and ongoing issues with budget transparency (…) this has resulted in budget restraints that have impacted Australia’s delivery of critical science programs in the Antarctic.”
The division’s director, Emma Campbell, told staff in an email earlier this year that it had spent $2m on external legal advice across 50 matters last year and that hiring two in-house lawyers could help “save money and get more timely advice”.
The division has also confirmed it can only send a small amount of scientists to Australia’s Davis research station because it is concerned there is not enough drinking water available for them because of leaking infrastructure. It knew about the problem before the pandemic.
Prof Dana Bergstrom, who recently left the division after 22 years, criticised the government for not funding a study of emperor penguin populations along the east coast of Antarctica despite the project being approved.
The British Antarctic Survey confirmed a “catastrophic breeding failure” of the penguins in late 2022. Analysis of satellite images showed the break-up of usually stable sea ice and the disappearance of four colonies at a time when chicks had not yet grown their waterproof feathers.
“The death of 10,000 penguin chicks hurts. It physically hurts. It’s eco-grief,” Bergman said.
“For an organisation not to be able to organise the logistics of an approved [science] project to fly the east coast of the Australian Antarctic territory, to confirm the location of emperor penguin colonies.
“I think it needs to look at itself.”
The University of Tasmania’s vice chancellor, Prof Rufus Black, told the inquiry the cuts to Antarctica science were coming at the worst possible time. He referenced “a failure of sea ice to freeze in the darkness of winter, with an area the size of Western Australia missing and large stretches of coastline ice-free”.
“The last time we had scientists on the sea ice in East Antarctica was 10 years ago. This was a time when it appeared that Antarctica was more resilient to climate change than expected, and sea ice extent was actually increasing,” Black said.
