Bronwyn Isaacs
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Bronwyn Isaacs
@find-bronwyn.bsky.social
550 followers 940 following 97 posts
Anthropologist in Aotearoa
University of Waikato
Chasing all things anthropology especially media, digital, visual life, work, production studies and politics.
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Reposted by Bronwyn Isaacs
mehr.nz
I'm not 100% sure but I think Newsroom may have omitted a 'f*cking' from my phrase "Do these people read the news?"
The Marsden Grant, New Zealand’s flagship discovery science fund, was recently restructured to focus on research with economic potential, and its total was set to decrease by $15m over three years. The Strategic Science Investment Fund decreased by $24m in Budget 2025, the Health Research Fund by $17m and the Catalyst Fund, for international collaboration, by $12m. Money was reallocated towards the new Invest New Zealand agency, aimed at attracting overseas innovation and investment. Since then, the 2025 Nobel Prize in Economics was awarded to a team of researchers who investigated the link between increased technology funding and sustained societal growth, which Mehr said underscored his point. “Do these people read the news? Like, a Nobel Prize was just awarded to people who proved that investing in science is a better mechanism for economic growth – which Luxon ostensibly cares about – than these other kinds of short-term investments,” Mehr said. “We’ve got $55 million, roughly, per year to spend on basic science. And if you open up the news, what you hear about is Chris Luxon spending 320 times that on a single road. It’s just kind of pathetic. “You could change the colour of the signs on that road, and you would spend more than this entire country spends on basic science. That is batshit. It’s just completely insane.” (The road in question was the Northland Corridor, the low end estimate of which was recently revised to $18.2b.)
October 28, 2025 at 7:33 PM