Risking Knowledge: short-sighted budget cuts jeopardise decades of public service in natural sciences
By Dr James Rule, Assoc. Prof Nicolás Campione, and Prof Vera Weisbecker
Do you remember the first time you visited a museum? It might have been for a school trip, or with your family to see the dinosaurs. Around 1 in 6 Australians visited a museum in 2021–2022, and across Australia, museums are a tourist hotspot. Museums are also among Australia’s most trusted organisations, providing a critical public service during an age of misinformation.
Only a small portion of museum objects are ever on display. Behind the scenes, museums care for the rest of the collections as custodians of Australia's Natural and Cultural heritage. This custodianship is fulfilled by specialist staff (such as scientists and collection managers) who facilitate access to their collections for researchers worldwide and guarantee the up-to-date knowledge shown in the museum’s galleries. These are critical museum roles, played by back-of-house staff, fulfilling the statutory obligations of State and Territory legislation to care for collections in the Public trust: in other words, the collections belong to the general public and are cared for and protected by public officials on their behalf.
But threats such as budget cuts and restructures put these collections at risk. The Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery (TMAG) is the latest collection to come under fire, with proposed cuts to critical collection support staff. Without sustained funding, museums are at risk of slowly degrading from trusted sources of knowledge to dumbed-down amusement parks, robbing us of the institutions that advocate for the wonders of the natural world.
Systematic cuts to funding
Australia’s State and Territory museums are not-for-profit organisations, relying on government funding to function. As such, reduced investment in museums risks compromising their capacity to care for our collections. For example, in 2024, the leadership at South Australian Museum announced that it was “not a university” and proposed a restructure that would have compromised its base scientific and educational functions. Criticism and opposition ultimately led to this restructure being shelved. A major risk to museum jobs is slashed funding to public services, which often results in job losses and occasionally also results in raised admission prices. The Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery faces similar cuts to collections, exhibitions, and library staff. The stated reason is to “reduce duplication” by, for example, consolidating the number of curatorial staff. As zoologists and palaeontologists actively studying museum collections, we question this line of reasoning.
An erosion of expertise in the age of extinction
Australian museums record our global biodiversity by building collections. Each generation of curators grows this biodiversity record during their service. However, this is contingent upon collections being adequately staffed by a breadth of scientists with expertise in particular groups of animals or plants.
For example, a mammal scientist can not care for a fish collection, nor can a beetle expert be put in charge of marine molluscs. This is akin to expecting a car mechanic to service a plane. The overall lack of duplication is particularly evident at TMAG, where the collection staffing is already “bare-bones”; for example, its zoology and palaeontology collections are only served by one vertebrate and one invertebrate curator, each of whom must care for a wide variety of animal specimens, both fossil and living. Further reductions to back-of-house museum staff are therefore untenable.
Currently, TMAG cares for over 1 million objects, including: almost 250,000 objects in Arts and Culture (including the globally important First Nations collection); over 800,000 specimens in natural history; and a library containing over 15,000 rare books. The proposed cuts at TMAG will result in a loss of the expertise required to care for Australia’s second oldest museum collection, and will reduce the museum’s ability to fulfil its obligations to care for the collections and support scientific research.
Scientists employed at museums such as TMAG also describe new species as part of their remit. For living species, once described and named, they can now be protected under legislation; however, such protection relies on our ability to identify them. Here again, museum curators, researchers, and their collections serve a unique taxonomic service. Taxonomy (the science of describing, classifying, and naming new species) is underfunded and often not supported at universities or elsewhere. The wildlife identification expertise of museum scientists also helps support Australia’s biosecurity measures, providing their expertise to identify pest species which threaten our wildlife. Museum experts also play an important role in fighting wildlife diseases such as the emerging threat of H5N1 bird flu, as the government bodies rely on them to identify at-risk or infected wildlife (sometimes from incomplete samples such as a foot). Finally, TMAG is particularly special in that it holds the Tasmanian Devil Tissue Bioarchive, which is used by researchers to combat Devil Facial Tumour Disease, an archive that can only be curated by a specialist zoology curator.
Museums support Australia’s science
Behind the scenes, museums support science in various ways. They play critical roles in training the next generation of scientists. The collections are also accessed by scientists worldwide, either via loans of specimens, requests for data, or by visits to the collection.
The collections at TMAG are used in both National and International research. Left to right, top to bottom: Alan Tennyson (New Zealand), Dr Emily Sperou (United States of America), A/Prof. Nicolás Campione (University of New England), Dr Sayaka Mori (Japan), Natasha Nosiara (Monash University, Honours student), Catherine Vally (University of Tasmania, Masters Student), Dr Sarah Kienle (United States of America), Dr Hazel Richards (New Zealand).
The collections at TMAG have been crucial to our research as Zoologists and Palaeontologists. A recent study by one of us (Dr Weisbecker) revealed new information about the unique hunting mode of the iconic (and extinct) Tasmanian tiger, using specimens from TMAG’s collection. Australia is currently in the midst of an extinction crisis, and the eradication of the Thylacine in Tasmania was, in many ways, a wake-up call that our impact on biology will lead to losing some organisms forever. We still have much to learn about Australia’s unique fauna during this age of mass extinction, and museum collections will play a pivotal role in our future understanding.
Specimens at TMAG are often digitised by 3D scanning, for use in scientific research. Shown are an Australian fur seal and Leopard seal (top left, credit Dr James Rule), an extinct Thylacine (bottom left, credit Dr Douglass Rovinsky), and the fossil Zygomaturus (right, credit Astrid O’Connor and Natasha Nosiara).
Specimens from the TMAG collection also recently helped another of us (Dr Rule) solve the mystery of how seals hear sounds underwater. For decades, scientists did not know how seals were the only mammals that could hear just as well underwater as they can in air. Three-dimensional scans and necropsies of seal specimens in TMAG’s freezers revealed that underwater sounds reached the middle ears of seals via a special tissue in their ear canals. This discovery is important as knowing how seals hear underwater can help inform how they are impacted by underwater noise pollution.
And active collaborations between TMAG natural history staff and University of New England palaeontologists (A/Prof. Campione) are discovering the diversity of Triassic vertebrates found in Tasmania, revealing the survival of vertebrates across Earth's largest mass extinction. In the past, the transition between the Permian and Triassic periods (approximately 252 million years ago) saw the largest mass extinction event in Earth’s history, when most of the species living at the time died out. Tasmania includes some of the only Triassic-aged rocks in Australia (and across the globe), and it plays a very important role in helping us understand how life recovered after these mass extinctions.
Beyond specific projects, TMAG plays a key role in the training of the next generation of scientists. Honours, Master's, and PhD students are often mentored by museum curators, who provide them with specific training in museum and biodiversity skills, something they cannot acquire at a university. The collections support PhD projects throughout Australia, with students and other early-career researchers often visiting to collect data.
Finally, the TMAG collections are accessed and studied by scientists around the world. Some researchers travel from the other side of the planet to do research on the collections at TMAG, often in collaboration with the Museum’s scientific staff. For example, TMAG scientists are leading a team of Australasian researchers conducting ecotoxicology studies on Tasmania’s birds via local necropsies and experiments at the Australian Synchrotron. This is just one of many examples of how museum collection staff, including curators, are involved in cutting-edge science that would otherwise not be done.
Underfunding museums causes irreversible damage
The funding drought for science and culture has reached a precipice where, when money is tight, gutting our beloved museums is becoming the norm. This is a symptom of a wider funding crisis in science. According to the Australian Academy of Science, our investment in research and development is well below the average stipulated by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). This is despite the vast majority of Australians being in support of science.
If funding cuts to science and museums continue, there will be a significant loss of expertise. Specifically for TMAG, fewer staff means care for the collections will become diluted, if not ignored entirely, making it difficult for research to be done on the collections. There will also be fewer or outdated exhibitions, as museums will have less in-house expertise to draw from, and the significant biosecurity and pest-control roles played by curators as the Government’s on-call experts will become unfulfilled. This will significantly reduce the Tasmania Museum and Art Galleries ability to fulfil its legal obligations to care for the Tasmanian collections. These cuts are also contrary to the museum’s 2025-2028 strategic plan, which recently re-affirmed their commitment to place the museum collections as a central pillar of the organisation. This position is also much more in line with the strong support foreshadowed at the federal level, with the 2026 National Research Infrastructure Exposure draft naming Australia’s collection as critical national infrastructure. The proposed cuts would erode the TMAGs ability to benefit from this development, and mean that the majority of the objectives of the TMAG ACT of 2017 would also be unable to be fulfilled.
Therefore we, as scientists, call for these proposed cuts to be reversed. These proposed cuts are short-sighted, and the damage from them will be felt for decades to come. The museum’s staff is already incredibly small compared to other State and Territory museums across Australia, meaning further cuts are untenable. TMAG plays a vital role not just in providing joy for visiting families and schools, but also in supporting Australia’s at-risk scientific infrastructure.
Without expert staff, TMAG’s fate will be that of the Thylacine. Extinct.