Fear of cruellest cut sparks revolt

JUST as even her friends felt free to stab her in the front, and it appeared impossible she could alienate another single person or group, given that pretty much everybody who could be, had been, Julia Gillard has united the most vulnerable and the most venerated in the community against her government.

It takes a rare kind of talent to contemplate a measure that compels three outraged mums from Bendigo to jump on a bus for Melbourne, or for a couple whose son had just been diagnosed with a brain tumour to travel from Bathurst to Sydney to join terminally ill patients, researchers in lab coats and office workers in their thousands in cities across Australia.

Only a truly methodical approach could weave together such a coalition, including Nobel Prize winners, the Greens, the independents and the opposition. Yet the government has achieved just that thanks to plans to slash $400 million from medical research funding in the May budget.

And it is happening as Tony Abbott attaches a plus to his name and minimises the negative by addressing issues such as welfare reform, indigenous intervention and infrastructure spending.

It could take a while for his approach to penetrate and his next chance to prove he is serious will be his budget reply speech, but if he persists, people could begin to think he has the odd good idea and maybe is a viable option. Stranger things have happened.

As a former health minister, Abbott is well acquainted with the value of medical research and also the potency of any campaign that its supporters may mount, so he found it difficult to believe, as did others, that the government would even think about cutting research funding.

Let's assume it is not true. One simple sentence from the Prime Minister would have killed the story stone dead.

She could have said: "I'm not in the business of ruling things in or not, but just let me say I have always placed a high premium on the work done by our medical researchers. It has been recognised internationally and it is valued highly here, and as a government we would not do anything that would endanger that."

End of story. Literally end of an extremely damaging story. Spare us the twaddle about refusing to rule in or out any pre-budget speculation. They do it when it suits and usually in those terms.

In fact, Gillard used a bullhorn last week at Luna Park to rule welfare reform into the budget.

Unless the reason it could not be denied was that it was true. Which, unhappily, it was.

The pre-budget season is always marked by different varieties of leaks. Portfolio ministers brief friendly journalists on their success in saving pet projects from the razor gang's slicing and dicing.

Occasionally the Prime Minister's office or even the Treasurer's feeds out juicy titbits to generate excitement, or unsavoury ones to prepare people for the worst, saving the best for the budget.

The leak on medical research was different, and what it revealed was deep frustration and divisions in the government over its operations, priorities and political risk assessments.

According to sources, the leak to the medical community came first from within cabinet then was backed up by the bureaucracy. It was leaked to them deliberately to warn that a $400m cut was on the way and if they wanted to stop it they had better mobilise quickly because they had only about a week to stop it.

They were told the government had decided medical research was ripe for cutting because it was not a "front of mind" issue for "ordinary Australians" that would trigger angry calls to Alan Jones, Neil Mitchell, Ray Hadley, Howard Sattler and the rest.

Let me declare an interest here and also provide an anecdote to illustrate a couple of points.

In 1999, when I was Peter Costello's media adviser, I received a phone call from Jonathan Cebon, head of the Ludwig Institute cancer centre at Melbourne's Austin Hospital.

Cebon had overseen treatment for my sister Christina, who had died a few months before. He rang because he was concerned that a big report recommending a boost to medical research funding would be overlooked.

We arranged a meeting with medical researchers who pleaded with Costello to nurture the culture that had produced such greats as Howard Florey (penicillin) and Frank Macfarlane Burnet (Nobel Prize in medicine).

Costello doubled funding for medical research in the May 1999 budget, and I pinched the line about nurturing the culture from the researchers for his speech.

In those days the Liberal Party's pollster Mark Textor conducted focus groups each budget night. Tex produced a tape of the audience reaction using people with Worm-O-Meters attached as they watched the speech. The worm went off the chart when Costello announced the medical research funding.

It was gratifying but unsurprising, given the high regard in which Australia's medical research community is held.

A succession of surveys confirms this, including a study last year commissioned by Research Australia, which found 90 per cent of Australians rated support for health care and hospitals above stopping asylum-seeker boats, reducing government debt, reducing taxes or introducing an emissions trading scheme to fight climate change, and that most people thought spending on research was already too low.

Australians are well acquainted with the calibre of research here and the life-changing and life-saving discoveries it has brought, from the early humidicrib, to spray-on skin for burns victims, to a vaccine for cervical cancer.

So why this government thought it would be able to cut $400m and nobody would notice is perplexing.

If the Gillard government had been more prudent in its spending and more rigorous in its administration, the budget would not be in the parlous situation they would have us believe it is in now, but even so, cutting medical research will not save, it will cost. Every dollar spent on Australian medical research results in savings on health spending of $2.17.

Late last week the size of the cut was "being negotiated". If it comes in at half the $400m planned, the government thinks it will be able to placate its critics with another well worn post-budget tactic: see, it wasn't so bad after all.

Here's a hot tip. It won't work. There is zero tolerance for any cut in this area. Long after the headlines have disappeared, the patients, their families and those who try to help them remember.

A young woman with Parkinson's disease told one of the rallies that what the researchers gave her, and she thanked them for it, was hope. That is priceless. Money helps keep it alive. Wayne Swan of all people should know that.