Members of the broad Australian scientific community will be wondering what the future holds this week; with pre-poll comments from the newly-elected federal government clouding the path ahead for many researchers.

A press release before the election from the Coalition’s Chairman of the Scrutiny of Government Waste Committee, MP Jamie Briggs claimed they would: “crack down on Labor's addiction to waste by auditing increasingly ridiculous research grants and reprioritising funding through the Australian Research Council (ARC).”

According to the costings released by the party; it intends to gain $103 million in the next four years from “reprioritising Australian Research Council spending”.

This has caught the ire of the scientific community, especially those at the ARC. The Research Council say their funding allocations are awarded on the basis of genuine, expert assessment of projects, which should remain fundamentally independent of politics.

Science & Technology Australia CEO Catriona Jackson says that while “there is a distinct difference between having a set of priorities and political picking and choosing at the end of the process,” she believes there are serious questions that need to be asked about the new government’s intentions.

“We're just terribly concerned that the independence of the process is maintained and the quantum of funding for the ARC, the body that funds university research in this country, is maintained... We'd like to know how this new filtering process would work," she says. "Who would make the decision under this new process about who gets the grants and who doesn't? Would it be a bureaucrat? Would it be a politician?” Jackson said.

Many important discoveries have been made in the quest for an entirely different goal, it is for that reason that the ARC says it must continue to fund as broad a range of projects as possible – in order to maximise the chance of unexpected findings and inter-disciplinary crossover. The most prominent example of this scenario in Australia come from the invention of wireless communication protocols by CSIRO scientist John O’Sullivan, who was at the time working on a way to detect exploding black holes.

A large part of the incoming government’s dislike for the funding choices of the ARC seems to stem from a misunderstanding of the value of historical and social science research. Examples of “wasteful” research highlighted by the Coalition include studies on “reaching a better understanding of the self”, an examination of “sexuality in Islamic interpretations of reproductive health technologies in Egypt” and investigating “The God of Hegel's Post-Kantian idealism”.

Scientific community representative Catriona Jackson says: “You can't just have pure science research. You need to have research into the humanities and social sciences to understand the kind of world we live in... Scientists know that the flow of new knowledge is critical to the kinds of ‘real word’ results that all Australians are proud of, and that the Coalition is calling for.”