STEM education has been pushed in the last couple of decades in an effort to compete economically with the technological powerhouses of Asia and western Europe. It has always been understood, implicitly if not explicitly stated in the paperwork for most academic postgraduate and postdoctoral research projects, that the outcomes of such research should have at least a tenuous relationship with commercial exploitation in the future.

All research is commercial, even in the basketweaving disciplines. A university hires an academic to a)teach undergraduates, all of whom have a dollar figure attached to their enrollment and b)publish, publish, publish, all to enhance the reputation of the university, and hence better attract funding in the future. The T and E in academic postdoctoral STEM have always had the pressure to attract their own funding from industry, and the S and the M have frequently been reduced to gearing their research towards areas that industry might find exploitable.

STEM exists to make money, whether we want to acknowledge it or not. We are the slaves of business, and always have been. There's nothing all that unexpected about the CSIRO's pure science divisions being treated roughly - they exist to enhance the reputation of Australia as a modern nation, and for no other reason. Medical and biotechnology research at least has the very real potential to be a future cash cow, even if it costs a bomb in the interim with nothing exploitable on the short-term horizon. Maybe it's just a matter of the CSIRO's climate science people biting the bullet and finding a way to market themselves as commercial problem solvers for future climate-caused problems.