Defunding Science, Stifling Dissent

Defunding Science, Stifling Dissent: Lessons from Aotearoa

By Max Soar and Courtney Addison

Volume 27, no. 2, Political Economy of Science

Art by Jennifer Dahbura
Art by Jennifer Dahbura

 

The Trump administration has taken a political bulldozer to the sciences and institutions of the United States. Across the Pacific Ocean in Aotearoa New Zealand (NZ), a right-wing coalition government comprising the National Party, the even further right ACT, and New Zealand First is engaged in a similar campaign of epistemic destruction.

As the US government was taking universities to court, cutting science funding, and detaining international students, particularly those expressing solidarity with Palestinians, NZ was legislatively mandating that universities adopt “freedom of speech statements” whilst prohibiting them from taking positions on issues outside their “core role or functions.” In late 2024, midway through a review of the science sector, then Minister for Science, Innovation and Technology Judith Collins intervened in the country’s preeminent funding scheme, the Royal Society’s Marsden fund. In a move that will look familiar to scholars in other countries, she abolished the scheme’s humanities and social sciences panels, “updated” the Terms of Reference to require that 50 percent of funded projects should yield economic benefits, and removed “cultural,” “social” and “other” benefits as factors relevant to assessing research proposals in favour of “quantifiable impact.” Her announcement claimed that “real impact on our economy will come from areas such as physics, chemistry, maths, engineering and biomedical sciences.” In justifying the cuts, Collins singled out projects that she considered undeserving of funding, including one that investigated the policing of climate activists: “nah, that’s not science.”1

This reprioritization of funding forms part of a broader strategy of suppressing political dissent and critical expertise that emphasizes the social and cultural impacts of policy. Unprecedented penalties were levelled against Te Pāti Māori members of parliament for a haka that “disrupted” decorous debate about the Treaty Principles Bill—legislation that sought to rewrite Te Tiriti o Waitangi, the document that sets out the most foundational terms of Indigenous-Crown relations. Incoming Deputy Prime Minister David Seymour has repeatedly defended his pet Regulatory Standards Bill (RSB)—itself an attempt to entrench private property interests as foundational to “good” legislation‚ by reformulating Trump’s vocabulary, publicly accusing critically minded academics and others of suffering from “RSB derangement syndrome.” Combining right-wing sloganeering, reductive claims about science, and the anti-woke rhetoric of the right, representatives of the coalition government repeatedly find ways to undermine disciplines that produce critical knowledge and target individual researchers for fulfilling what is, in NZ, a legislatively specified role for academics as the critic and conscience of society.2

This is not merely a symbolic turn towards anti-intellectualism following the lead of our “traditional allies” in the US. These actions fit a broader national turn that has seen climate and other environmental targets diluted, military R&D boosted while independent research is cut, interference in educational institutions, and wide-scale restructuring of the research workforce via mergers of six Crown Research Institutes and disestablishment of one (alongside broader efforts to undermine labor).3 There is a perception in NZ that Trump is an extreme individual whose politics are exceptional and whose dramatics would never be effective here. This sense of our own cultural pragmatism and moderation, however, is belied by the moves being made to sidle closer to the very politics that are being watched with such skepticism from afar. While the US government has erased publicly accessible climate data and dismantled effective health and environmental programmes, here, Shane Jones (NZ’s Minister for Oceans and Fisheries, Regional Development, and Resources) has advocated in parliament for expanding gas exploration. In Trumpian fashion, Jones announced, “Not for us shallow virtue-signalling, pronoun-entanglement politics,” before removing his cap and reading its slogan aloud: “Drill, baby, drill. Make New Zealand great again.”4

Examining this convergence makes clear that this is not simply a matter of bad actors attacking an otherwise sound system—and indeed, NZ’s science and higher education sectors have long bred inequity, injustice and precarity, especially for Māori and Pasifika scholars.5 Rather, entrenched political economic interests are reasserting the primacy of militarism and extractivism and the logics of a timeworn neoliberalism, while suffocating critical inquiry by increasingly authoritarian means. Research and education sectors abraded by decades of neoliberalism are pressed further into the project of insulating capital against efforts toward social and environmental accountability, while simultaneously having their social and political roles constrained. As the tendrils of the market encroach, they undermine such institutions’ capacity to act as critic and conscience, to generate good knowledge, and to be sites of resistance and problematization to the consequences of capitalist crisis.

The Shift to Neoliberalism

Ideals of economic value and productivity have structured NZs science, research, and higher education sectors for decades. At the outset of the twentieth century, NZ was internationally regarded as “a laboratory of social experiment” (in the words of to-be British Prime Minister Clement Atlee) for its radically extensive social welfare initiatives.6 By the mid eighties, it had become the testing grounds for a rather different experiment in renewed liberal economics. By deregulating financial markets, privatizing state assets, flattening taxation structures, diminishing union power, and introducing corporate managerialism to the workings of government, NZ implemented a “model of pure neo-liberal economic theory” that, as legal scholar Jane Kelsey writes, was “hailed … as an example for the rest of the world.”7Though scientific research had always been guided by and applied to economic priorities, the sector was recomposed into commercially modelled organizations that would compete for contestable funding aligned with the national interest, and research expenditure dropped dramatically.8 In universities, free tertiary education was abolished while managerialist performance metrics (e.g., quantitative benchmarking and research quality assessments, student evaluations) took hold, worker precarity increased, and PhD students were repositioned as underpaid research laborers.9

Decades of evidence now demonstrates that these policies create inefficiencies and perverse incentives (see, for example, universities’ growing investments in real estate) and breed inequality.10 Nonetheless, they are now being intensified in tandem with a globally inflected, domestically moulded right wing politics. Here, as in the US, the transcendent logic of economic reason—given voice in rhetoric of efficiency, value for money, and small government—has paved the way for neoliberalism’s authoritarian engine, which now roars to life through the “reconfiguring of state and institutional power in an attempt to insulate certain policies and institutional practices from social and political dissent.”11

The Neoliberal Lab Renewed

Since the coalition government was elected in 2023, clear policy patterns have emerged. Academic guidance is repeatedly moderated by the influence of lobbyists or the overruling interest of the export economy, as in the repeal of smokefree legislation and the alcohol industry’s direct input in Ministry of Health initiatives to reduce alcohol harm. Environmental interests have also suffered, with legislative reforms paring back environmental protections and easing the passage for extractive and infrastructural projects. After a lengthy vacancy, the Prime Minister’s Chief Science Advisor role was filled by the principle scientist of dairy industry organisation DairyNZ, and his advisory panel was stacked with actors from agribusiness and agri-tech industries with no scientific expertise. Whilst in the US oversight roles in federal agencies have been dismantled and executive orders abused, the NZ government has passed or debated a record number of bills via parliamentary urgency, a procedural motion which expedites lawmaking in part by reducing opportunities for scrutiny and consultation. Passed under urgency were bills that disestablished the dedicated Māori Health Authority and narrowed eligibility for pay equity claims, amongst others.

Meanwhile, research funding decisions evince a heightened commitment to military interests. Cuts to the Marsden fund, which supports research that pursues new knowledge without necessarily having immediate applied uses, were accompanied by a massive funding increase for defense, including $100-200 million dedicated to defense-related research and development with the aim of developing advanced weapons technologies for both domestic use and international export.12 Further funds from Marsden, the Health Research Council and more were diverted to a new Institute of Advanced Technology (IAT). The IAT will “have a relentless focus on commercialising cutting edge technology and creating economic value,” through the likes of over-valued and unreliable technologies such as AI and quantum computing.13 Negotiations over whether NZ should join AUKUS (an Australia, United Kingdom, United States security agreement that would compromise the country’s nuclear-free stance) are billed as a matter of building science and technology capacity—though they more convincingly resemble an effort “to subsidise inadequate research, science and innovation budgets.”14

Research funding changes are sold on the tired trope that invested funds will flow back to actual publics via a more productive economy. But the policy decisions discussed above suggest that public money will instead be laundered into private wealth through mining companies, military technologists, and other industry entities. Efforts to more comprehensively align research and higher education with the priorities of national security and economic production reduce those institutions’ capacity to “absorb and ameliorate the pressures emanating from socioeconomic restructuring.”15 Underlying these moves is an apparent disinterest in knowledge and curiosity on the part of those in power. Claiming that it is “no longer financially viable,” the NZ government has moved to abandon the national census, declining to even collect up-to-date information about the populations it governs, and choosing instead the associative magic of collating and analysing pre-existing economic and administrative data to support a “growth agenda.”16

Against Exceptionalism, Toward Scholarly Solidarity

It is not just public money, public health, environmental standards, or the intangible goods of research that are at stake here. Observing how law is currently being made demonstrates that expertise is malleable to partisan interests and at times rendered entirely optional, with governments globally emboldened to undertake swift and unilateral decision-making. Changes to research and higher education are unfolding against a backdrop of larger interventions in New Zealand’s economy that recenter extractive and primary industries, position the military as a major driver of technoscientific progress, and externalize environmental and human impacts. Money is being taken from research and education and maneuvered elsewhere—often to precisely the undertakings that scholars would find cause to critique. This is an explicit commitment to reinforce the worst tendencies of science’s historical alignment with the imperial, extractive, and exploitative social relations, and simultaneously a novel effort to turn research into a vehicle for partisan interests.

Although the US administration is distinguished by how brashly it flouts evidence and demolishes institutions, developments in NZ caution that we must be alert to the subtler machinations that suppress critique, alchemize public money into private wealth, and enclose knowledge production in corporate interest. At the same time, we mustn’t revert to uncritical appeals to evidence or rationalism. Now more than ever there is a need to understand science, data, and knowledge as products of historically contingent political and economic interests and arrangements. These accountings allow us to face the provenance of our knowledge claims as well as those that might yet emerge, newly enabled, from compromised origins.17

Here, recent defunding and political effrontery has awoken an instinct from many scholars to insist on the economic and social value of academic research. Such arguments aren’t wrong, but there are consequences to arguing in the terms of those who are so diligently dismantling the capacity for good knowledge production. Equally, expressing the value of the social sciences and humanities in terms of their use for instrumentalising the discoveries of natural science risks acceding that the production of quantifiable value is, ultimately, the point of research.

Demonstrating the value of sound research, diverse expertise, and a strong education sector is not enough. We must be able to articulate the vital importance of academic research and education outside of the rubric of economic returns. The unique power of higher education is not its ability to equip students with skills and knowledge for the job market, but rather for navigating the wider world—providing the equipment for producing a world structured by human and non-human needs. Further, academics, researchers and other knowledge producers must understand that we are one kind of worker and organize accordingly. Libraries, databases, professional associations, experimental facilities, and more all require labor to remain functional and accessible. This means taking seriously those political developments that impact the people whose labor the academy relies on, often without acknowledgement—cleaners, librarians, and technicians, for example. We must organize to defend the infrastructures of knowledge production and maintenance before they are dismantled. Future capitalist governments will not provide the resources to rebuild what is lost. We must establish coalitions to critique and materially resist regressive policy actions and advocate for independent, adequately resourced scholarship. It is crucial to build solidarity across academic disciplines, institutional settings, and geopolitical borders—especially in light of the obliterative scholasticide in Gaza and the reciprocal attack on global higher education targeting expressions of solidarity with Palestinians. Certainly, those of us in Aotearoa New Zealand owe our Māori colleagues solidarity, since Indigenous scholarship and Te Ao Māori is expected to be unduly impacted by economically oriented funding changes.

We can take lessons from the solidarity shown between staff and students at anti-genocide campus occupations in the United States, the post-COVID resurgence of union and protest activity amongst NZ academic workers, and intensifying strike action led by secondary teachers, nurses, doctors, and other health workers in New Zealand.18 As of writing, nearly 90,000 NZ workers (from a working population of ~2.9 million) are set to strike simultaneously in October 2025.19Organizations such as the Save Science Coalition—a collaboration between unions and academic societies to “campaign for a well-funded public science system”—demonstrate an appetite for collective action on these issues. There is an opportunity here, not to preserve a system that has long been deeply flawed, but to change it for the better: to build a model of research and higher education that is accountable to the people and places from which it comes. Failure to do so risks capitulating to the production of ignorance that is the predictable objective of the gleeful epistemic destruction we see in both the United States and New Zealand. An ignorance that, left unchecked, aims to produce a population for whom the transcendent, universal reason of science and economics combine to convince them to consent to the conditions of their own domination.

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Max Soar is a precarious academic living and working in Te Whanganui a Tara, Wellington, New Zealand. His scholarship draws on STS and Marxist traditions to interrogate the production of knowledge and the politics of technology, with an emphasis on the ways the two combine within far-Right political formations under conditions of capitalist crisis.  Courtney Addison is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Science in Society at Te Herenga Waka—Victoria University of Wellington, in New Zealand. Her research is situated between STS and anthropology, with a current focus on poisons, pests, and animal life.

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Notes

  1. Judith Collins, “Oral Questions, Questions to Ministers: New Zealand Parliament,” Hansard, December 10, 2024.
  2. Education and Training Act 2020, s. 268(2).
  3. Crown Research Institutes are publicly funded research organisations, which are being turned into Public Research Organisations following a review of the country’s research system.
  4. Shane Jones, “Parliamentary Debates, House of Representatives,” Hansard, April 2, 2025.
  5. Tara McAllister et al., “Under-Represented and Overlooked: Māori and Pasifika Scientists in Aotearoa New Zealand’s Universities and Crown-Research Institutes,” Journal of the Royal Society of New Zealand 52, no. 1 (2022): 38–53, https://doi.org/10.1080/03036758.2020.1796103; Sereana Naepi et al., “Fixing the Pakaru Pipeline: Some Recommendations for Change,” New Zealand Science Review 79, nos. 1–4 (2023): 41–45, https://doi.org/10.26686/nzsr.v79.9509.
  6. Branko Marcetic, “New Zealand’s Neoliberal Drift,” Jacobin, accessed October 7, 2025.
  7. Jane Kelsey, The New Zealand Experiment: A World Model for Structural Adjustment? (Bridget Williams Books Limited, 2015).
  8. Rebecca Priestley, “A Survey of the History of Science in New Zealand 1769–1992,” History Compass 8, no. 6 (2010): 474–90,https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1478-0542.2010.00684.x.
  9. Anil Kumar Narayan, “The Development and Use of Performance Measures in New Zealand Tertiary Education Institutions,” Accounting History 25, no. 2 (2020): 193–218, https://doi.org/10.1177/1032373219842383; Cris Shore, “The Reform of New Zealand’s University System, Aafter Neoliberalism,’” Learning and Teaching 3, no. 1 (2010): 1–31; Rebecca Stringer et al., “‘My Entire Career Has Been Fixed Term’: Gender and Precarious Academic Employment at a New Zealand University,” New Zealand Sociology 33, no. 2 (2018): 169–201, https://search.informit.org/doi/10.3316/informit.952640679087793; Max Soar et al., “Sweat Equity: Student Scholarships in Aotearoa New Zealand’s Universities,” New Zealand Journal of Educational Studies, March 24, 2022, https://doi.org/10.1007/s40841-022-00244-5.
  10. Martin Benedict Andrew, “Neo-Neoliberalist Capitalism, Intensification by Stealth and Campus Real Estate in the Modern University in Aotearoa/New Zealand,” Journal of Applied Learning and Teaching 6, no. 2 (2023) doi.org/10.37074/jalt.2023.6.2.16; Max Rashbrook, Too Much Money: How Wealth Disparities are Unbalancing Aotearoa New Zealand, Bridget Williams Books, 2021; Shore, “The Reform.”
  11. Ian Bruff, “The Rise of Authoritarian Neoliberalism,” Rethinking Marxism 26, no. 1 (2014): 115,https://doi.org/10.1080/08935696.2013.843250.
  12. “Government Unveils Strategy for the Defence Industry,” RNZ, October 3, 2025.
  13. Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment, “Fiscal Transfers to Implement the SI&T Reforms,” (Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment, 2025), 8.
  14. Sian Troath, “Joining AUKUS Could Boost New Zealand’s Poor Research and Technology Spending—But at What Cost?” The Conversation, February 2024, https://theconversation.com/joining-aukus-could-boost-nzs-poor-research-and-technology-spending-but-at-what-cost-223719.
  15. Bruff, “Authoritarian Neoliberalism,” 115.
  16. Shane Reti, “Sharpened Focus on Quality Economic, Population Stats,” Beehive.Govt.Nz, accessed October 7, 2025.
  17. For two classic Science & Technology Studies texts that address the situatedness of knowledge and the critical purchase of constructivist accounts, see Donna J. Haraway, Modest_Witness@Second_Millennium. FemaleMan_Meets_OncoMouse: Feminism and Technoscience (Routledge, 1997); Bruno Latour, “Why Has Critique Run out of Steam? From Matters of Fact to Matters of Concern,” Critical Inquiry 30, no. 2 (2004): 225–48.
  18. Matt Russell, et al., “Austerity, Precarity, and Tertiary Union Strategy: Notes from The Left TEU Network.” Counterfutures 15 (December 2024). https://doi.org/10.11157/cf.v15.253.
  19. RNZ. “Policy, IT and Other Back-Office Health Workers to Join Major Strike Action,” New Zealand. October 8, 2025.