Rutherford’s Ghost and the $18 Billion Road

inside the batshit budget that sends our scientists packing

In a bold new economic strategy, New Zealand has decided the best way to compete in a high-tech global economy is to starve its scientists and build a very large road.

Not just any road, mind you. A road so expensive that you could fund the entire Marsden Fund 320 times over and still have enough left to repaint the lane markings in gold leaf. Somewhere in Northland, a stretch of asphalt is being carefully prepared to carry cars, trucks and the pulverised remains of the country’s scientific credibility.

Into this wanders Dr Samuel Mehr, cognitive scientist, MacDiarmid Emerging Scientist Prize winner, and apparently the only person in the room who can read a spreadsheet.

Mehr moved here from the US, brought his lab, created 12 jobs, 12 families paying tax, 12 mortgages, probably 12 parents at school cake stalls. The sort of small, compounding benefits that any government pretending to care about productivity usually pretends to like. He met the Prime Minister, who was, by Mehr’s account, genuinely thrilled to be in a room full of scientists.

Then came the Budget. It turns out “I love science” is much cheaper to say than to fund.

New Zealand’s flagship discovery science pot, the Marsden Fund, sits at around $55 million a year. Not for one lab. For everyone. For a whole country. This is the fund that is supposed to underwrite the next Rutherford, the next R programming language, the next globally useful breakthrough. Instead, it is being sliced, reoriented towards short term “economic potential”, and quietly drained of cash.

Meanwhile, one road project is costed at $18.2 billion.

You can almost picture the meeting -

“Prime Minister, we could invest in decades of fundamental research, lift productivity, attract global talent, and build high value industries.”

“Or hear me out… hear me out… what if we build a road so staggeringly expensive that future historians can use it as a teaching aid in courses titled ‘Case Studies in Self-Sabotage’?”

The numbers get worse the closer you look. A Marsden grant is about $900,000.00 Universities slap on a 100 percent overhead. Suddenly the scientist has $450,000.00 left, spread over several years. In practice, that means one post-doc, some equipment and a prayer. This is not a system for producing frontier science. This is a system for producing burnout, grant reapplications and flight bookings.

Meanwhile, in places that have apparently read a book since 1973, Canada is waving CAD$4–8 million per lab in its Excellence Research Chairs programme. Australia has just announced AUD$370 million for basic science for a single year. Germany’s Max Planck Institutes are prowling the planet with offer letters. It is a global bidding war for talent and New Zealand has turned up with a Countdown voucher and a stern lecture about fiscal discipline.

Just to rub it in, the 2025 Nobel Prize in Economics went to researchers who showed that investing in technology and science funding leads to sustained societal growth. You would think this might ring a faint bell in a government that cannot open its mouth without saying “growth”. Instead, one gets the sense the report has been filed somewhere between “inconvenient” and “do not open”.

Mehr, to his credit, is not sentimental about any of this. Scientists, he notes, are not particularly romantic as a class. If it becomes too hard to run a lab here, they will move. Pack the lab, move the jobs, roll up the welcome mat and ship it to Toronto, Munich or Sydney. If you design a system that screams “please leave”, people will eventually listen.

And then there is the great chorus of silence from the universities. You might imagine the vice-chancellors, faced with the slow strangulation of their research base, storming Wellington, demanding a rethink, explaining that gutting discovery research is about as clever as sawing through the branch you are sitting on. Instead, as Mehr puts it, they seem to be quietly twiddling their thumbs while the oxygen is turned down.

So that is one future. The one we are currently trialling.

Fast forward fifteen years. It is 2040. New Zealand is still very proud of having invented R, back when the fax machine was king. The best scientists now live elsewhere. The Marsden Fund, having been “reoriented” several more times, consists of a commemorative plaque and a sponsored internship in “Innovative Road Cone Placement”.

The Northland Corridor is beautiful, though. You can drive along it and marvel at the engineering required to replace an entire research ecosystem with bitumen.

The productivity problem stubbornly refuses to fix itself. Industries complain about skill shortages while the people who could build new industries are working under someone else’s flag. A few shiny Invest New Zealand brochures talk earnestly about “attracting innovation” to a country that will not fund its own.

Now, slide the door the other way.

Same starting point. Same 2023 prize ceremony, same genuinely excited Prime Minister. Only this time, someone has the wild idea that enthusiasm and money should occupy at least the same postcode.

The Gluckman review lands and instead of being admired and shelved, it becomes the blueprint. The government doubles discovery research funding over five years. The Marsden Fund is expanded, not carved up. Overheads are reformed so that more of the grant actually reaches the lab bench. Health and international collaboration funding are treated as investments, not loose change to plug political holes.

Vice-chancellors, sensing a rare moment of alignment, pile in. Universities co-fund targeted programmes, industry partners come to the table and the message to the world is simple. If you are a serious scientist who wants to do serious work, you can do it here.

By 2035, that world looks very different.

The “brain drain” has quietly become a two-way flow. Yes, some New Zealanders still leave. That is what ambitious people do. But a matching stream arrives - mid-career researchers from the US, early-career stars from Europe, returning Kiwis who finally see a way home. Labs grow. Startups spin out of universities not in ones and twos, but in dozens. Some succeed, some fail, most teach useful lessons.

The country’s fabled productivity needle, which has sat rusted in place for decades, finally nudges upward. Not because someone cut another regulation, but because new methods, new technologies and new firms changed what was possible. A climate tech breakthrough out of Wellington finds global customers. A medical device born out of a health research project in Christchurch scales. A new statistical tool, created in a lab that would have otherwise moved to Canada, becomes as ubiquitous as R.

The narrative about New Zealand changes subtly overseas. It is no longer just “nice place to visit, beautiful mountains, sheep”. It is also “serious about science, good place to build a research career”. That shift does not happen with slogans. It happens with budgets.

Because this is meant to be dark satire and not light fantasy, let us note the funniest part of that alternate universe. It still has roads. The trucks still roll. The asphalt still gets laid. Nobody starves because the Northland Corridor was built for eighteen billion instead of twenty. The difference is that somewhere in Treasury, someone remembered that spreadsheets have two sides and that the “investment” column is not supposed to be decorative.

Back in the present, none of this is impossible. It is simply not being done.

Instead, we have a “batshit” Budget for science, a government that insists it is “committed to innovation” while cutting the basic research that makes innovation possible and a university sector that seems oddly willing to watch its seed corn be fed into someone else’s silo.

When the next high profile scientist quietly departs, there will be the usual handwringing, the usual columns asking how this could happen, the usual promises to “review settings”. But the truth is simple enough.

If you treat science like a cost, you will eventually run out of scientists.

If you treat it like an investment, you might just end up with a future.

Right now, New Zealand appears to prefer the road.

If this struck a chord, you will find more hard truths, sharp edges and the occasional laugh at www.regenerationhq.co.nz/satire. We can do better and we should expect better, starting today.