The CSIRO Staff Association has accused the Opposition of using Senate estimates to wage a political campaign to discredit the national science agency’s climate change research, the Canberra Times reported today.

”Our scientists are being subjected to inappropriate, politically motivated attacks during these public hearings,” association president Michael Borgas told the newspaper. He also dismissed recent Opposition claims that  CSIRO censored and suppressed a paper by environmental economist Clive Spash because it criticised the Ruddca Government’s emissions trading scheme as ”political opportunism gone mad.”

‘There was no great conspiracy of suppression,” Dr Spash, who has since left CSIRO to teach in Norway, was quoted as saying. “It is absolute rubbish for the Opposition to say that, and staff are pretty pissed off about it.”

The comments follow a recent Senate estimates hearing in which Liberal senator Julian McGauran told CSIRO chief executive Megan Clark the research agency’s reputation ”was iconic until the climate change debate” occurred. Another Liberal senator, Alan Eggleston, quoted reports claiming ‘’systematic intimidation” of CSIRO scientists  including Dr Spash  had occurred because they ”did not toe the line on climate change views.”

Visiting Canberra this week for the annual Science Meets Parliament briefings, Dr Borgas called for bipartisan political support for open debate and diversity in government science, according to the Times.

”There is a worrying level of confusion amongst our politicians and within the community about the role of government science. In our view, this much confusion is the direct result of the politicisation of science that has sprung up around the climate change debate,” he told the newspaper.