Opposition Leader Bill Shorten says he will step in to bat for CSIRO staff, amid strikes and threats to research centres.

Mr Shorten says science funding most be locked in place, in response to industrial action at CSIRO and uncertainty over the future of co-operative research centres.

Shorten has pledged to fight research cuts in next week’s Federal Budget, claiming in a press conference at the Univer­sity of NSW that he wanted to make science a “key policy priority”.

“We will have a lot more to say before the next election,” he said when asked how his plans would be funded.

Meanwhile, the Greens’ research spokesperson Adam Bandt has demanded that the Government offer a “fair pay deal” to CSIRO staff, who went on strike last week.

The CSIRO Staff Association has launched bans on ­administrative work to protest enterprise negotiations that were going nowhere.

The nation’s top science agency had $111 million cut from its funding in last year’s budget.

“If Tony Abbott can give our defence personnel a real pay rise without asking them to lose conditions, he can do the same for our scientists,” Bandt told reporters.

Last year’s budget also cut $80 million from the Cooperative Research Centres scheme, leading many labs to wait anxiously for the government’s response to a review of the programme by lawyer David Miles.

The Vision CRC – a centre that brings together a broad range of participants [http://www.visioncrc.org/our-participants.html]- says it was forced to lay off 45 staff as a result of the cuts so far.

Science Minister Ian Macfarlane claims the response to the Miles review will not necessarily be part of the budget.

“There’s not just one big-bang announcement,” he told News Corp reporters ecently.

“Within the next six months we will have done what we need to do to get the CRC program ­focused on what we need it to do.”