News
10 May 2018
CEO statement on Federal Budget 2018-19
The CRCSI welcomes the announced funding to Geoscience Australia of $262m over the next few years, with $63m ongoing. Geoscience Australia provides a critical mass of Australia’s expertise in geology, geophysics, geodesy, satellite imagery, and topographic mapping, and has been a key supporter and core partner of the CRCSI from our inception.
GA maintains a very strong activity base within the CRCSI and enables Objective 1 of the CRCSI Strategic Plan: to conduct research that solves the signal processing and economic impediments to the creation of a sparse, continental-scale, precise positioning multi-GNSS network.
The Australian Government Budget investments in the Satellite Based Augmentation System (SBAS) and the National Positioning Infrastructure (NPI) outlined below will translate our research under this objective into operational capability.
Similarly, the announcement of the additional funding in Digital Earth Australia (DEA) is extremely pleasing and we congratulate GA on this significant achievement. DEA had its early beginnings in CRCSI projects and demonstrates how our research improves the ability and efficiency of government and industry to rapidly create and value-add spatial information products.
Research and innovation take time and investment. These three initiatives have been the culmination of years of research across many projects within the CRCSI. Over 150 collaborating organisations have been brought together from government, academia, and industry to conduct research which has influenced the investment into these three new initiatives by the Australian Government.
We are proud to have played our part and look forward to a future where all Australians have access to reliable, accurate location information whenever and wherever they need it.
Again, we welcome the Australian Government Budget announcement and congratulate GA on its unwaivering leadership to deliver on Australia’s priority science objectives.
Graeme Kernich
