In a poor omen for scientific and intellectual freedom in Australia, barely a month after it was elected the Rudd government appears to have been caught red-handed trying to censor science.

Just before Christmas a flurry of media reported that leading scientific agencies such as CSIRO, the Australian Institute of Marine Science, the Australian Nuclear Science and Technology Organisation, the Australian Research Council and the Co-operative Research Centres were instructed by the new Department of Innovation, Industry, Science and Research that all media releases related to the Government’s ‘key messages’ had to be cleared by the Department and possibly even by Minister Kim Carr.

This evoked nightmares of science censorship in the Howard era when agencies knew, often without having to be told, that statements on greenhouse research and other sensitive topics were non grata. But it came as a shock, nevertheless, because Labor - and Carr in particular - had been robust critics of the government gag.

CSIRO, for one, requested the instructions in writing, got them, and then wrote back contesting them. This yielded the spectacle of the head of the Department explaining the gag was a perfectly usual measure while his Minister expostulated that the instruction was “badly worded and ill-informed” and did his best to disown it. With Gilbertian farce, the injunction to clear controversial matter with the Minister appears not to have applied to the Department’s injunction to its agencies to clear controversial matter with the Minister.

To put the most innocent interpretation on it, this might simply have been one of those stuff-ups that occur as Ministers and bureaucrats get used to one another, and bureaucrats sometimes exercise an unwonted freedom, by being a little over-protective of both themselves and their new Minister from the prying of voters, taxpayers, journalists, citizens and other riffraff. However there are signs it may be more.

For one thing, a string of authoritative science figures took it seriously enough to slam the injunction, on the Australian Science Media Centre’s website.  SA Chief Scientist Max Brennan said the Government had no right to muzzle CSIRO or the CRCs. Environmental scientist Ian Lowe described it as “very depressing news for those of us who campaigned...against the suppression of science by the Howard Government.” Science communicator Rob Morrison said any attempt to control scientific messages politically would be a dreadfully retrograde step, while science communicator Niall Byrne said it would be “bad for science and bad for Australia”.

The irony in all this is that Labor was elected to govern - at least in some part - due to public disgust at the Howard Government’s bad treatment of scientific advice on greenhouse. Opinion polls taken before the election showed over 90% of Australians felt there were grounds for concern about greenhouse – and this played its part in positioning the Coalition as out of touch.

There is no doubt the new Rudd Government wishes to be careful about how it controls its “key messages”.  This, after all, was one of the sources of its electoral success. The issue is whether this extends to censoring scientific opinion, either by gagging it or – worse – by politicising it. Greenhouse, education and science policy are three issues affected by the proposed injunction – and this episode suggests the government does not welcome public scientific debate or dissidence on these.

The danger to Australia is illustrated by the greenhouse and salinity debates. In the first, we had a scientific community, more or less in consensus on greenhouse and we had a government more or less sceptical about it. What followed was a concerted effort to suppress the scientific point of view in favour of the political, or at least to ignore it and to defer meaningful action. In the second, a parallel debate took place a decade or so earlier over salinity, when scientists who warned of its ravages found themselves attacked by politicians who preferred not to know.

Both illustrate the risks to Australian society of having governments that are under-educated about science, and who are willing to ignore, suppress or distort its findings in favour of some convenient political calculus. The danger is that, when next our scientists discover something we urgently need to know as a society, politicians will prevent them from informing us. This sort of nonsense has more in common with Lysenkoism under Stalin, in which political theory arbitrated scientific findings.

Labor is fortunate this issue has arisen so early in its term. It is an opportunity for it to reflect about the central importance of scientific investigation and the free dissemination of what it finds, in order that our society may make the best-informed decisions about its future.

This is an opportunity for the Rudd Government to reject the encroachment of censorship on science and make a public statement of principle about the importance of freely sharing new knowledge with all.

In an interview with HES, Senator Carr promises to “restore public benefit as a fundamental objective”.  Knowing what our scientists have discovered and what they think about it is a fundamental means of delivering the public benefit in science. It should not have to pass through a political filter.

The Rudd Government should commit to supporting freedom of scientific inquiry and speech without delay. Conversely, its silence should be seen as ominous.